GALERIE STEFAN RÖPKE
St. Apern-Strasse 17-21
50667 Cologne
Germany
+49 221 255559

 

Read On... Galerie Stefan Röpke, Cologne 

February 27 - April 24, 2010

 

We are pleased to present new work by Mariele Neudecker in her fifth solo-show at Galerie Barbara Thumm.

Stay Forever and Never Come Back, the central work by Mariele Neudecker in the exhibition, is conceived as a counterpoint to the otherwise so lofty character of here three-dimensional replicas of Romantic landscapes installed in tanks filled with water and dye, and meanwhile holding the status of the artist's trademark.

 

Inspired by Henry James's famous ghost story The Turn of the Screw as well as by Benjamin Britten's opera version of the same name, Mariele Neudecker's new model - entitled Stay Forever and Never Come Back - depicts a houseless, homeless setting abandoned to decay. Ruins with blank window openings, missing roofs and collapsed walls as well as the remains of a tree skeleton stretching barrenly skyward define the dismal scenery. The main building resembles that of a former, now abandoned, brewery in Aldeburgh, England. The work was executed during Mariele Neudecker's residency there, an opportunity offered exclusively to artists devoted primarily to the visual realization of classical music. Three videos on monitors are positioned at the edges of the architectural sculpture at table height. Landscape scenes filmed by the artist herself, for example the smooth surface of a lake into which a stone falls now and then, are superimposed with sequences from the English horror film The Innocents of 1961 by Jack Clayton. The latter is a film adaptation of the novella by Henry James, in which two innocent orphans are supposedly possessed by evil spirits. In the video, the two figures hazily appear and disappear again. As in the work Everything is Important and Nothing Matters, much attention has been devoted here to staging the viewer's gaze: windows, doors and rooms open up numerous perspectives onto the individual video images. Mariele Neudecker used Benjamin Britten's composition to create a strongly distorted, fragmented soundtrack generously interspersed with moments of ominous silence.

 

As was already the case in her multipartite room installation on Gustav Mahler's Kindertotenlieder, in which music and image are interwoven to striking effect, Mariele Neudecker once again creates a suggestive visual and acoustic framework for the depiction of landscapes of the soul. Whereas in her depictions of nature, the gradual discolouration of the water in the glass cases serves the purposes of atmospheric condensation, here it is the interplay between the emotional power of the music, the cinematic images and the symbolic setting which evokes an imaginary event. In the manner of a "mind map", the installation provides various pieces of evidence which join to form a richly associative whole, while at the same time permitting no definitive conclusions. By overlapping fiction and reality, the installation also continually points to its own artificial and constructed quality.

 

In her artistic practise, Mariele Neudecker is consistently concerned with optical and psychological phenomena, i.e. with the shifting of perspectives - an approach clearly exemplified by her mirrored video installation Only the Past. Here the gaze into a puddle, its contours alluded to on the model of a polled tree trunk, takes on the same meaning as the contemplation of passing clouds and icy landscapes - though, surprisingly, from flight perspective.

A metaphor of vision per se are the two glass balls in the work 4.7km = 3 Miles or 2.5 Nautical Miles. Each containing an upside-down model of a lighthouse towering into the clouds, they are reminiscent of a pair of eyes radiating light and at the same time reflecting it. An antithesis is formed by the replicas of two flight recorders, whose contents - the Final Fantasy - are not revealed by their impermeable black casing.

 

Text: Angelika Richter

 

 

Galerie Barbara Thumm
Markgrafenstrasse 68
D-10969 Berlin
+ 49/30/283 90 347

 

Galerie Barbara Thumm 

 

Read On... Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin 

 

 

March 19th - May 9th 2010

 

'TimeScale' continues Ian Johnson's enquiry into the conceptual and physical implications of man's impact on the urban and natural landscape and ways that this can be configured intuitively. It consists of inter-related sculptures, drawings and assemblages that interlace attributes of the elemental with various concepts of organisation and categorisation common to man's need to understand his own history and development.

 

Cultural anthropologists studying cultural diversity, collect data on the impact of global economic and political processes on local cultural realities. The empirical purity of knowledge gained when the standard model for measurement can only really come from within the single cultural reality of the observer, reveals the complexity and questionable objectivity of any conclusions drawn. Johnson works not from the assumption that sense can ever be made from his own enquiry but rather that sense can be 'felt'.

 

Methods of presenting artefacts in museums; the classification and ordering of exhibits in an attempt to explain a culture or plot a history, is referenced in the drawing 'Timescale (light box #1) ' which provokes contemplation and quiet objectivity. The tabletop sculpture with carefully positioned, painted black seeds entitled 'Badlands' (In the gallery window) assumes a long-lost logic. It is an aberration of modern taxonomy; a perverse panorama for some ulterior game-plan. Placed around the walls, the three small sculptures - 'Untitled #1 (Ash) ' / 'Untitled #2 (Steel) ' and 'Untitled #3 (Oil) ' could be interpreted as offerings, altar-like objects which have an imperative of origin and meaning beyond immediate grasp, but which provide acute points of concentration formally and conceptually around the room.

 

In contrast to these objects, which celebrate unavailability, detachment and mystery, the large branch-like forms that dominate the gallery provide a tangible subjective experience. The semi-chaotic over-lay of forms, stacked, strewn and positioned on the floor and partially climbing the walls, creates a sense of location, an apocalyptic landscape. Titled 'Crosswire (Antenna) ' they are a caricature of nature, over-simplistic and clearly man-made; a visual confessional.

 

March 20 - May 1, 2010

 

Gigantic collections of stars, gas and dust clouds form the nebulae of the universe, the basis for the creation of our solar system more than four billion years ago. These star factories of the universe, the nearest one 1,300 light years away, are both unattainable and unfathomable in their powerful boundlessness.

Based on photos from the Hubble and the Chandra telescopes Jone Kvie has demarcated the otherwise abstract forms to concrete physical reproductions in a number of new sculptures of wood pulp with the shared title Sculpted Gas. With these works he maintains his interest in depicting natural forms and phenomena and man's relationship with them.

The scale and material of the sculptures give a lightness and a feeling of fragility that contrast with the monumental objects they depict. By presenting the nebulae like sculptural objects one of the greatest forces in the universe suddenly seems manageable and tangible. This inherent duality in Jone Kvie's sculptures points to man's need to rationally understand the universe, but also to the impossibility of this. Our reason, which says that all objects have an end, collides with our fantasy about the infinity of the universe. The sublime is put on the agenda, and nature is acknowledged as the stronger.

 

While the sculptures in Sculpted Gas send us many light years out into space, we are drawn back to Earth with the work Untitled, where four tree roots, shaped in German silver, stand fused and frozen on the gallery floor. With the roots planted deep in the earth, they seem to ground us in our own concrete reality, but the hollowed-out stumps with an inside lining of black pigment let us fall back into the nothingness of the black holes of the universe.

 

Jone Kvie (b. 1971) has in recent years shown his works in venues such as Sörlandets Kunstmuseum, Norway; Krannert Art Museum, Illinois; The Beijing Biennial; Kunsti Museum of Modern Art, Finland; The Wanås Foundation, Sweden; Charro Negro Galeria, Mexico; I - 20 Galleries, New York. Until May 1st Jone Kvie will present his solo show H II Region at Elastic in Malmø, Sweden.

 

 

NILS STÆRK 
NY CARLSBERG VEJ 68
DK-1760 COPENHAGEN V
+45 3254 4562

 

NILS STÆRK

 

Nils Stærk Contemporary Art, Copenhagen