calendario eventi  :: 

X

16/1/2014

just came to say Hello

Klemm's, Berlin

Emanuel Geisser, Markus Karstiess, Friedrich Kunath, Martin Mele, Katja Novitskova, Amanda Ross-Ho, Philippe Vandenberg

If idea equals ideal, individuals in a state of total isolation with no authorities, no external manipulations, no political constraints and no social dilemmas to disturb the integrity of their personality should ultimately be happy people. Nothing spoils the surface tension of the pristine and rounded fluidity of the humanoid entity – blissfully expressing from oneself and to oneself in a closed circuit. Unfortunately, idealizing isolation is all too common worldwide, simply unsurpassed as a dualistic method of punishment. The end effect causes a deprivation of freedom, culminating in a torturous solitary confinement.

Dr. Snaut, in Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris, declares, "Man needs man". But is this so? What is an individual anyway? And where does his encapsulating membrane dissolve? What distinguishes the self from the other? Are we not, in the sense of Truman Capote’s shipwrecked humanism, "All one man"? Maybe, the so-called 'self' is only a psychedelic hallucination brought on as the result of an undigested interaction with the environment. Is the epistemological impotence of homo-sapiens conquerable through the tactics of self-scrutiny? The reflection one sees is more similar to the image of the unshaven next-door neighbor than to an electrified biomass in the depths of self-exploration.

Like an inverse Janus head or a Siamese Narcissus, the observer and the observed attempt to dance around the double helix of a shared DNA, and through it, obtain uniqueness. It is not a sphere, nor a circle, that serves as an allegory of the closed unit, but a bipolar hyperboloid functioning like a magnet, attracting metallic shards of a broken mirror. Whereas in this realm, one mouth of a two-headed snake will attempt to devour itself, man is incapable of being left alone.

On one hand, the title Just came to say HELLO is a declaration of the youthful absence of expectations, and on the other hand, a curiosity for the phenomenon of pre-collective communication. The exhibition plays thematically within the corridor of aesthetic self-exploitation.

The works included by artists Emanuel Geisser, Markus Karstieß, Friedrich Kunath, Martin Mele, Katja Novitskova, Amanda Ross-Ho and Philippe Vandenberg intimately confront opposing states of duality either by expressing a sense of artificial self-isolation through stylization or abstraction of one’s experiences and neuroses, or through the creation of seemingly totemic idols.

It’s a venturous undertaking – to let oneself be moved by the works of singular artists through their selected micro-, macro-, or mega-cosmoses and provoked by the intersections of their orbiting paths. So once again, with a disarming resonance: I just came to say hello.

Alexej Meschtschanow

This exhibition is the second part of a sequence of three exhibitions that has been conceived by Klemm's together with artists Alexej Meschtschanow and Ulrich Gebert, and which accompanies the gallery’s exhibition program.

Philippe Vandenberg (1952 – 2009)
No title, 2005-2008
Chalk on paper, 85.5 x 100.6 cm / 33 5/8 x 39 5/8 inches

Philippe Vandenberg (1952 – 2009)
No title, 2005-2008
Chalk on paper, 85.5 x 100.6 cm / 33 5/8 x 39 5/8 inches

Image: © image courtesy of the estate of Philippe Vandenberg /Hauser&Wirth, Zurich

Opening: Friday, January 17th from 6–9 p.m.

KLEMM'S
Prinzessinnenstr. 29, Berlin
Hours: Tue–Sat 11 – 18 h
Admission free

stampa

permanent link