|
ART COLOGNE
2011
45. Internationaler Kunstmarkt
Cologne
April 13th
- 17th, 2011
Vernissage
on Tuesday,
April 12th, 5 pm
Axa Art Professional
Preview on Tuesday,
April 12th, 12 pm
ART COLOGNE 2011:
13-17 April 2011
NEW
POSITIONS showcases 20 young innovative
artists
‘NEW POSITIONS’,
ART COLOGNE’s sponsorship programme for young, innovative
artists, was launched in 1980. The programme offers young
artists selected by a panel of experts free exhibition stands
of 25 square metres. The stands for the young artists adjoin
the stands of the galleries representing them. This year’s
selection panel has singled out twenty young artists. There
will be a special prize – the Audi Art Award for NEW POSITIONS
– for the best young artist. The prizewinner will be given a
solo show at the Cologne artothek. The award also includes the
publication of a catalogue. The package is worth EUR 10,000.
The award ceremony will be held at ART COLOGNE at 3.00 pm on
Friday, 15 April 2011. ‘The sponsorship programme brings the
artists and their galleries a huge amount of public exposure,’
emphasizes Klaus Gerrit Friese, the chairman of the
Bundesverband Deutscher Galerien und Editionen (BVDG). The
programme is supported by the German Federal Government, the
State of North Rhine-Westphalia, Koelnmesse GmbH and the
BVDG. ART COLOGNE runs from 13 to 17 April
2011.
A look at this year’s ‘NEW
POSITIONS’ points to the continuation of a trend noticeable in
previous years. Cross-medial convergence is a common
denominator in the work of many of the young artists selected.
Much of it is interdisciplinary in nature, making it hard to
label in terms of conventional artistic media. Painting
continues to be strongly represented. One photographer has
been selected and only one artist works exclusively in the
medium of sculpture.
Fritz
Bornstück (Mikael Andersen, Berlin / Copenhagen) uses
found objects, detritus and leftovers, piling his paintings
high with an uncoordinated mass of unsavoury objects set
against murky backgrounds. An example is the oil titled
‘Warmer Kühlschrank’ where a chaotic confusion of
indeterminate shapes informs the composition. In tableaux like
‘The court of the bloody Duchess’, ‘The Backstage Table’ and
‘Fast Food Romance’ a carefully composed still-life effect is
achieved. Bornstück uses compost as a vanitas motif,
creating pitch-black chasms that exude the menace of evil. His
virtuoso paintings of decomposition and decay both repel and
fascinate.
The paintings of the
English artist Sean Dawson (Buchmann, Berlin
/ Lugano) are compelling in their dynamism. He works his
large-format canvases using sweeping gestural brushwork to
create turbulent swathes of entangled bands and rope-like
lines that seem to surge over the picture plane and beyond.
This multi-layered mingling of three-dimensional space and
matter evokes illusionistic depth, identifying Dawson as the
creator of a variety of abstract illusionism.
Helene
Appel (Luis Campana, Cologne / Berlin) uses unprimed
brownish ochre canvases to produce subtle compositions that
are finely balanced somewhere between figurative painting and
abstraction. In their linear precision and intense attention
to detail, paintings like ‘Putztuch’ and ‘Stoff’ have
extraordinarily realistic qualities. Tiny details, intricate
patterns and even the folds of drapery are so precisely
depicted that an irritatingly illusionary impression is
created. In his series titled ‘On a single breath’ the young
Cracow artist Bartek Materka (Wolfgang
Gmyrek, Düsseldorf) depicts an imagery of floating, dissolving
contours. The view of the rippling water surface evokes mixed
feelings of freedom and underwater weightlessness associated
with premonitions of danger and destruction. The paintings of
Simone Lanzenstiel (Barbara Gross, Munich)
are characterized by an impression of work in progress. Her
brushwork has a deceptive spontaneity and conveys a feeling of
ephemerality which conceals a subtly interwoven response to
observed detail. Fundamental to Lanzenstiel’s work are spatial
relationships and the diffusion of the spatial limitations of
the canvas. In her wall and installation paintings the
interplay between what is seen or transposed and what is added
or invented is designed to encourage dialogue. Dominik
Sittig (Christian Nagel, Cologne / Berlin / Antwerp)
deploys complex painterly processes in his paintings,
reworking and overpainting them again and again. His use of
coarse, heavy impasto gives them extraordinarily haptic
qualities. Abel Auer (Sies + Höke,
Düsseldorf) conjures up a fantastic world of brightly
coloured, surreal landscapes. His large-format canvases are
peopled with curious hybrid figures, solitary forests, lone
trees and discordant mountain landscapes. Cacophonies of
colour and pattern overcrowd his images which slip into
stifling overload, leaving the viewer with an impression of
oppressiveness. The Korean artist Noori Lee
(Tony Wuethrich, Basle) has a highly distinctive style that
melds photorealism, Abstract Expressionism and
Neo-Expressionism. Lee’s complex, large-format paintings draw
on photographs and combine Western and Eastern influences,
evoking in his depictions of uninhabited rooms and houses a
disturbing, strangely disconcerting atmosphere.
The paintings of
Gábor Pinter (Erika Deak, Budapest) are
charged with playfully ironical allusions. Their crudeness
points to the abbreviated style of graffiti painting and
references the vocabulary of that subculture. Kiko
Pérez (Heinrich Ehrhardt, Madrid) breathes new life
into Colour Field painting. He paints on wood and paper and
also works in public spaces where he delivers strikingly
original artistic statements. The young Dutch street
photographer Paulien Oltheten (Fons Welters,
Amsterdam) is a talented observer of unusual situations and
showcases the quirks of human behaviour in the public domain.
Her approach is a unique mixture of spontaneous and staged
photography.
Three different media –
drawing, sculpture and video – are equally important in the
work of the South African artist Cameron
Platter (Ernst Hilger, Vienna). Platter has revived
the art of storytelling, reinterpreting it with input from
local politics, third-rate gangster films and children’s
cartoons. His video installations – made of over-large
coloured crayon drawings and sculptures of jacaranda wood –
are alive with with black humour and cynicism. Frauke
Dannert (Rupert Pfab, Düsseldorf) makes paper
collages out of photocopies of paintings, newspaper cuttings
and images printed off the internet. She reconfigures them,
giving them entirely new meaning. Snippets of architecture are
one of her preferred motifs and she reconstructs them into
surreal buildings that expand out across walls and floors
creating an emotive form of three-dimensional, walk-through
picture space that the viewer can engage with.
The Mexican sculptress
Monica Martinez (Gentili, Prato) creates
architectural models that recall factories and production
plants. Anna Galtarossa (Studio La Città,
Verona) deploys great imaginative power to produce colourful
assemblages from a wide variety of (found) objects – objects
that recall the statues of the deities and the fetish objects
of ethnic art.
The work of Sonia
Leimer (nächst St. Stephan, Vienna) is multilayered
and revolves around the concepts of space and time and
particularly the human perception of space and time. In film
and architecture she opens up new realms of artistic thought.
She relates tales of the long-lost and the long-forgotten to
explore avenues of memory and to enquire into their
significance.
The work of
Christoph Blawert (Produzentengalerie,
Hamburg) defies categorization. He makes use of a wide variety
of media, integrating paintings, films and installations to
create scenarios that are at times site-specific. Anna
Lena Grau (Thomas Rehbein, Cologne) ferrets out
forgotten or little-known stories. Her sculptures and
installations are meditations on philosophical and scientific
methodologies.
One of the many interests
of the American artist Shana Lutker
(Wetterling, Stockholm) is Sigmund Freud’s ‘The interpretation
of dreams’. She addresses elemental feelings – shame,
loneliness, despair, pangs of conscience – often presenting
them in large, multi-part installations packed with
photographs, drawings and performance art. The American
painter and sculptor Brett Lund (fiebach,
minninger, Cologne) draws on a wide variety of sources,
referencing some of the icons of art history.
This year’s
selection panel: Sven Ahrens, Cologne (gallerist);
Caren Jones, Cologne (gallerist); Stefan Kobel, Berlin
(journalist); Andreas Schulze, Cologne (artist); Dr. Stefan
Kraus, Cologne (director of Kolumba, Cologne’s Archiepiscopal
Art Museum). Non-voting members of the panel were: Roland
Berger and Herr Braune, representing the German Federal
Ministry for Cultural and Media Affairs (Berlin / Bonn); and
Daniel Hug, Koelnmesse, artistic director of ART COLOGNE. The
meeting was chaired by Klaus Gerrit Friese of the
BVDG.
|
