Kuckei + Kuckei
Berlin
Linienstrasse 158
+49 030 8834354 FAX +49 030 88683244
WEB
Joe Biel / Guy Tillim
dal 1/5/2014 al 13/6/2014

Segnalato da

Kuckei + Kuckei


approfondimenti

Joe Biel
Guy Tillim



 
calendario eventi  :: 




1/5/2014

Joe Biel / Guy Tillim

Kuckei + Kuckei, Berlin

Recurring pictorial themes in Biel's works are humaneness, irony, contradictoriness, change, and transformation. Tillim presents photos around Jo'burg, it was a self-fulfilling prophecy, backed up by eyewitness reports and statistics.


comunicato stampa

Joe Biel
Short Stack

Joe Biel's work was, and still is, a poetic clash between beauty and the sometimes brutal absurdities of the contemporary world. He frequently places his figurative drawings in a bottomless, negative space. As a result, his figures, torn away from any narrative surroundings, are isolated in their own being. Recurring pictorial themes in his works are humaneness, irony, contradictoriness, change, and transformation. His works know no fixed interpretation. The observer is invited to emotionally approach or distance him/herself from the works. Biel always leaves it to his audience to come up with an interpretation. The scenes, although they are often frozen in a specific moment, begin to move on automatically. Consequently, Biel insists that people participate in, and not passively observe, his works.

With his work Veil, he is in the process of creating his panopticon of the cultural and media landscape of the 21st century. On more than 1,000 television screens, he captures scenes from classical films, excerpts from works of art, recordings of concerts, scenes from the daily flood of TV broadcasts, news, sex, and infamous and less infamous personalities going about their daily affairs, supplemented again and again by a white hiss. Here, the fragment is the decisive motif. Biel sees in it the artistic heritage of our age, and describes it as his way of recording information. During the process of selecting the scenes, items of personal relevance, such as particular films and music, become a drop in the ocean of monitors.

Joe Biel will probably finish his work on Veil in autumn 2014. Although the work will not yet be on show at his present exhibition Short Stack, but it will still be important, because it represents the starting point for his group of works entitled Stack.

He refers to his stacks as his little collages. The pictures flickering across the television screens have been composed as poetic montages and construction kits of associations. Here, too, Biel distances himself from a rational selection – allowing space for an intuitive selection process instead. He frankly admits that he doesn't always understand the selection himself. For instance, Stack 6 (Dave) shows two isolated figures – one of them floating in water. The title of the work makes it possible to solve the riddle of the identity of one of the objects represented, but this is by no means the key to understanding the work. More decisive than the history of the thing presented is, it would seem, the moment of presentation and what is being transported. Hence, it is, on the one hand, a mixture of astonishment, fear and reverence and, on the other hand, perhaps something like fighting spirit and exhaustion, too. As with Stack 6 (Dave), the other works in this series live off the energy of the pictures, each one a tiny riddle, and each a new story.

Joe Biel was born in Boulder, Colorado in 1966. In 1990, he received his MFA in painting at the University of Michigan. He currently teaches art and design at California State University, Fullerton. In 2003 and 2008, he received the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award. His large-format work Compound is a part of the new hanging Bruegel Land at the Stedelijk Museum Lier and the KMSK in Antwerp, Belgium. He has been living and working in Los Angeles, CA, since 2000.

-----

Guy Tillim
Jo'burg

Artist’s statement:
White residents fled Johannesburg’s inner city in the 1990s. The removal of the Group Areas Act foreshadowed a flow into the city of black residents and owners of small businesses seeking opportunities and better lives. Former denizens looked back in self-righteous justification at a city that was given over to plunder and mayhem. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy, backed up by eyewitness reports and statistics. Everyone had their horror stories.

In amongst this turmoil existed the tower blocks occupied by tenants who were holding onto occupancy and managing the buildings in ways of their own devising. Their story had gone something like this: in the 1990s the owners absconded, leaving managing agents to retrieve what rents they could. In most cases, these agents were corrupt, did not pay the utilities, and disappeared with the money. These were tidy sums, handed over by poor people who conscientiously paid up to avoid having to go back where they came from.

The decay of Jo’burg’s centre can be ascribed to many factors but perhaps none more so than the absence of Body Corporates. These had become relics of a more genteel era; the communal responsibilities that are contentious in even the most well-heeled blocks were not marked out. Windows were broken and not repaired. Lifts froze and their shafts became tips.

The relationship between tenants and owners or their agents deteriorated with disputes over the state of the buildings, and in some cases resulted in unpaid rents and dues. The buildings started looking like fire hazards, and the City Council began closing on them for unpaid utilities. In between the needs of City Council and the aspirations of developers anticipating the bloom of an African city lies the fate of Jo’burg’s residents. The outcome will decide whether or not Johannesburg becomes, again, a city of exclusion.

Image: Guy Tillim, "Thulisile, eight floor, San Jose, Olivia Street, Bereaw", 2004. Archival pigment ink on 300g coated paper 42 x 59,5 cm. Edition of 5 + 1AP

Opening reception Friday 2nd May, 19 – 21h

Kuckei + Kuckei
Linienstr. 158 D - 10115 Berlin
Opening hours: from Tuesday to Friday 11 - 18 and Saturday 11 - 17
Opening hours during Gallery Weekend Berlin:
Saturday, May 3, 11am - 7pm / Sunday, May 4, 11am - 7pm
Free entrance

IN ARCHIVIO [44]
Hlynur Hallssons / Jenny Brillhart
dal 16/10/2015 al 18/12/2015

Attiva la tua LINEA DIRETTA con questa sede