31 October til 23 December 2009   

Heejung Kang (*1979, Jejudo/South Korea) creates puzzling relations of objects and forms, which remain in a state of suspense: they oscillate between the representation of a subjective and a multi-faceted reality on the one hand and an artistically poetic abstraction on the other hand. A suspense factor is aroused, unsettling and disturbing, raising more questions than providing answers. In her first solo exhibition Kang focuses on the family - an intimate theme that almost everybody can relate to, as relationships are the main issue.
In her work holding warmth the artist walls up the windows of the gallery with self-made, semi-transparent blocks consisting of polyurethane foam. Kang creates a homelike but eerie atmosphere. In the gallery space a suggestive, rampant ensemble of sculptures primarily made of fragile materials and found objects is set up. It focuses on the intellectual examination and interrogation of the meaning of family, identity, strangeness and memory in the context of a cultural discourse. Instead of clearly shaped results Kang shows the way of image production with its flaws, detours and excess. While shaping and forming she moves between personal daily routine and the art world in order to trace the interdependency of private sphere and the general.        
The ensemble does not develop linearly but in complex and cross-linked episodes, it grows into time and space and therefore does not follow any clear chronology. Kang considers the world, human relationships (thereby somehow declaring a spiritual kinship with the art of Anna Oppermann) as "ensembles", as changeable constellations of perception and reflexion, of rules, stories, emotions and theories. At first sight one sees enigmatic formations of an unclear structure. Only after a second glance one recognizes - or one rather suspects - a complex system of relations inherent in the images on different levels. Hence the form of the ensembles is open and ambivalent but still organized in a particular classification and reference system.  
Her processional working method, the reproduction, the installing and reinstalling bring about that the complexity of her works is no definite, finally accomplished state but one that is constantly changing.  Limitation and delimitation, the bounds of inner and outer world are the subject, the necessarity of a demarcation, the delimitation of traditional signs and symbols.
A fragile 'me', in a spidery writing attached to the floor tries to assert oneself or rather to "hold one's ground" in between the interwoven family network and to find a place, a resort for oneself. In return the word 'alcohol' - similarly cut out in a rudimentary manner and mounted between two wooden boards refers to the delimiting possibilities of this 'me'. Everything, even dealing with language, is primarily raw material for the exploration of form as transformation of physical and intellectual existence. Therefore the artistical experience of the environment is characterized by the inclusion of action. Art alters and transforms and is thereby comprehended as doing, acting and working. In this respect the part of the hand as well as the use of physical energy is not to be underestimated. By incorporating various drawings into a space-specific installation context they can be comprehended as an honest call to communication and personal exchange without any cynical distance. With her upvaluation of being Kang promotes an intensified visual perception of the world in order to push forward the limits of a conditional human nature and to amplify the space of human freedom.
           
With her visual strategy - aware of errors and unpredictable events - the artist refers to the working method of human consciousness, its constant unsteadiness and drifting in between constriction and amelioration, its murmuring of texts and subtexts. Yet the improvisational installations of Heejung Kang are organic and animated sculptures that recount all possible forms of life itself.. Lived time, memories of distant and nearby places as well as incidental moments find its way into this pulsating spatial structure. It is stands by in order to provide an osmotic exchange for those who are willing to engage in the enthralling adventure of "self"-exploration and it reveals its mysteries to anybody who brings in his phantasy in return. The artist is not primarily interested in final settings. Hence her works remind the beholder of construction sites rather than temporary architectures. Kang creates readable places, places which point out relations and which debate energies and utopias. Heejung Kang developed a translation of these places and spaces in transition. With her installations referring concretely to the particular exhibition space the artist succeeds in revealing a different, second reality behind the allegedly familiar reality one is used to. By occupying space with poetic-creative sculptural arrangements Heejung Kang approaches the essentially relevant space, the space of relations and resonance between human beings, for which the family might function as primal scenery.

Harald Uhr

Sebastian Brandl
Brüsseler Str. 4
50674 Köln

T +49 (0) 221.222 99 793
F +49 (0) 221.222 99 792
M +49 (0)178.925 21 98

www.sebastianbrandl..com 

 

 

 

 

Opening: October 30, 7 p.m.
till Dezember 12

 

On the occasion of the two-year anniversary of the gallery Clages, gallery artists Juan Pérez Agirregoikoa, Shila Khatami, Sara MacKillop, Marina Naprushkina, Anne Pöhlmann, Claus Richter, Monika Stricker and Bernhard Walter and four guest artists Rita McBride, Diango Hernández, Glen Rubsamen and Oliver Tepel are presented in the show "Twelve Arguments Part II". During the Art Forum the first part of "Twelve Arguments" was taking place, in Cologne there will be another representation of this exhibition with other works.

 

Clages
Bruesseler Str. 5
D-50674 Cologne

T +49.221.99209181
F +49.221.1794288

 

 

 

Stefan Löffelhardt
drei Wünsche (three wishes)

 

 

DREI Raum für Gegenwartskunst
Albertusstr. 3
50667 Köln

 

 

 

Adrian Norvid - DUMMKOPF
October 31. to December 19. 2009
Opening: Saturday October 31., 3 - 6 pm

 

'DUMMKOPF' features for the first time in Germany, works of the Canadian artist Adrian Norvid. Small works, sculptures, and wall-filling drawings, echoing the so-called ÒWimmelbilderÓ, all drawn on or made of paper, are Adrian Norvid's genre. Born in 1959 in London, the Canadian has taught drawing at Concordia University, Montreal since 1989. His works are represented in important Canadian collections, such as the Musee d'art contemporain de Montreal and the Musee du Quebec.

Norvid's wall-filling works are overloaded with imagery. Often excessive and graphically distorted, they occasionally take on the character of pattern or wall-paper. Typical for a 'Wimmelbild', the onlooker has to make their way through the complex contents of the picture. A whole host of image- and word-quotations, ranging from humorous to sarcastic, are set against each other. Association-rich, Norvid's works have an often obscure, narrative character, analyzing popular knowledge, cliches, folksiness, or nostalgia and debunking them.

The largest work of the exhibition is 'Tom Dick and Harry Haus', 274 x 635 cm: A half-timbered house with ramshackled roof is populated by strange figures such as a bosomy maiden with 'Weisswurst' chain, a stork with telephone receiver, a 'Rumpelstilzchen' with giant toothbrush, and Van Halen with Volkswagen emblem. On the left side of the house, right over the entrance door we read: 'The yummification of Germany', a multilayered wordplay. Norvid is tracing Germanness: politics, Weisswurst, Volkswagen, Birkenstock-sandals, history, fairy tales, language. Once access is found, the work, in the manner of the 'Wimmelbild', consumes our attention and drives us to seek out further discoveries. The artist takes us on a journey into Germanness. Like the joint smoking Snoopy on the roof he takes us on a 'trip'. But at the end all mysteries remain unresolved. In 'out of stock'-sandals the artist, absorbed in a book, leaves the 'house Germany' in a hopeless mix up behind him. Whirring chaos remains.
In contrast to the overloaded, huge drawings are Norvid's smaller works on paper. Here individual aspects, which could have sprung from one of the 'Wimmelbilder', get their own forum and are brought to a point.

Norvid's sculptures form a third facet of his work. Built of paper, everyday life articles, such as school milk cartons, are snatched from their usual context and, by mere inscription set into a completely new one. Such surprising turns typically reveal themselves to the onlooker only on closer inspection. Formally close to cartoon or comic, Norvid works with sarcasm, irony and plenty of humor. While keeping their autonomy, small drawings along with wall-filling works, paper sculptures and revised, found objects, form installations of baroque extent. They let the onlooker dive into the complex thoughts of the artist, which lead our subjective expectations and moral conceptions ad absurdum. Whoever allows themselves to get involved, will find himself at times with a bashful smile, a furrowed brow, or even roaring a laughter.

 

galerie julia garnatz
rolandstraße 83
d  50677 köln

tel +49-221-3406297
fax +49-221-3406517

 

 

 

 

KAI RICHTER
TROCKEN
31 October to 19 December 2009

 

 

 

Stef Heidhues
»Mongolische Reiter« (Mongolian Riders)

 

 

 

November 20th - December 19th, 2009

reception: Friday, November 20th, 6-9 pm

 

Schmidt & Handrup is pleased to present the first solo exhibition of Timo Seber.

The title of the exhibition "I'm That Chick" refers directly to the creation of real and invented self-image that Seber's work is concerned with. It is quoted from American R&B culture and Seber uses it here as a metaphor for the artificiality of any artist's biography.

Seber understands the self-positioning of the artist as the process of creation in which real and constructed facts reflect each other and begin to merge with the expectations of global consumer audiences. At the same time this invented "image" becomes an archetype that can be applied to refer to success and failure alike. To Seber art means indentity and identity is art; and in his work this alternated and self-reflexive premise is played through repeatedly.

 

The gallery installation that is comprised of paper collages on wooden stretchers, a large scale, delicately cut paper work, folding screens covered with paper and modular display pillars, thus puts Seber's own biography of growing up in 80s Germany into context with two other historic figures. The screens that have been printed with etchings from the 18th century hereby show reproduced works by Johann Elias Ridinger, a highly regarded German university dean and master printer of the period. The paper works mounted on stretchers refer to a rather different biography. They are introducing the heir of one of Germany's most powerful industrial families, Arndt von Bohlen und Halbach of Krupp steel. Arndt Krupp who despite best intentions and education cannot live up to the high expectations. Forced by his disapproving family to renounce his inheritance, he reacts with radical denial to the incapacity to deliver and ultimately resorts to a life of hedonism. In relation to the exhibition's title it becomes clear that Seber sympathises and dreads both biographies alike.

 

Through the interaction of different objects and recurring materials the viewer soon realizes that this work is also about negotiating past and current art-historical aesthetics. Artistic work and self-serving elaboration meet strategies of appropriation. Pencil drawings are being replaced by cuts, etchings are reproduced and stretched onto screens. Smooth paper surfaces turn out to be intricately woven patterns at closer inspection, or become a monochrome cut drawing portraying the board of directors of the Krupp company. In Seber's own painstaking remake, following a photograph from the year 1961, the crowd appears to be critically observing his work from afar.

 

Amongst those pieces are also the "objets trouvé" of Sebers own past: red plastic toy boxes, visibly marked by a German childhood. Already abstracted and absorbed into the formal language of the empty display cabinets, they are Seber's way of discussing the plain functionality of iconic Ikea-design, Minimal Art or even the conventionality of art installations in galleries.

 

Timo Seber's confidence may thus be comparable to that of the protagonists of the global music industry when he - somewhat ironically - proclaims "I'm That Chick". His work is the reflection of his own knowingly constructed biography as much as of all those promises and abysses of perfectly streamlined art production in the 21st century.

 

SCHMIDT & HANDRUP
Aachener Str. 23 (im Hof)
50674 Köln, Germany

T +49-221-2726-4635
F +49-221-2726-4637

SCHMIDT & HANDRUP 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jo Dickreiter, Carsten Fock, Dagmar Heppner, Martin Hoener, Klaus Kamptner, Matthias Meyer, Oliver Voss. All artists show works that center around abstract monochrome and monotone surfaces.

 

Galerie Eva Winkeler
Neusser Str. 257
50733 Köln

Tel +49 0162.2545894

 

 

Opening: Fr 20.11.09, 7 p.m.
21.11.-20.12.09

Nina Canell was born 1979 in Växjö, Sweden, and currently lives and works in Berlin. Her work seeks ways to address sculpture as a restless form with fleeting properties while liberating man-made objects from the drudgery of service and ascribing them a new status as vacuous, absurd or oblique in a quite poetic way. By doing this, Canell seems to suggest that the hierarchies of objects are negotiable, that the technologically advanced and the neolithically dumb are equally vulnerable to obsolescence. Relating spatial and structural concerns to that elusive fabric which constitutes the melancholic nature of being, the work facilitates a place in which matter and non-matter hold hands through carefully balanced sculptural happenings. Her phantasmal arrangements therefore exist as testing grounds in which logic leaps to the poetic, the static to a fragile balance of construction and circular flows of electricity or sound allowing sculpture to become a fleeting and wandering form of being. Abstract sound -- made in collaboration with Robin Watkins, and light play an especially important role within Canell's synaesthetic environments and are explored in installations as well as used as topics in videos and compositions. Watkins will present his new soundwork The Luminiferous Aether  created through a series of field recordings of utilises solar wind signals made in the Arctic Circle.

 

 

Events during the show:

Robin Watkins
Sound Screening: The Luminiferous Aether
Sa, 21.11.09, 3 p.m.

Laura Frahm
Lecture: Aethetics of Transformation. On Filmic Delimination of Space
Thu, 26.11.09, 7 p.m

 

Projects in Art & Theory
Regina Barunke and Lilian Haberer
Gereonswall 13
50668 Köln
Germany

 

+49-179 203 43 28 /  +49-163 783 54 74

www.projects-artandtheory.de 

 

 

 

 

Friday, 20 November - Sunday, 22 November, 2009
 
Elín Jakobsdóttir 's film works capture condensed scenarios, silently flitting between documentary processes and the oblique approaches of the imagination.  Moving amongst three projections in the dimmed gallery space, the viewer is cast into a spectral limbo.  Presented upon a floor-mounted wooden screen "Worktable" (2003) begins with a recording of the deliberate actions of a young boy absorbed in his play. Moving across the paper's blank expanse, his crayon carefully traces the contours of an invented building's floor plan.  Synchronised upon the obverse, "Worktable 2" (2009) shows the same boy, now an adolescent, seated at one end of a divided table facing a man two generations older.  Their actions are obscured from one another as they delineate architectural and spatial configurations through gesture and drawing.  As with much of Jakobsdóttir's work, these visual fragments suffuse apparently commonplace incidents with a dreamlike logic.  The shifting point of intersection between the imagination and reality is carefully articulated through the different approaches adopted by the three characters as they variously seek to project the inner workings of the creative mind onto the external world of material fact. 
 
Work and play, contemplation and fantasy are also referenced in the third work, where the domestic interiors of Glasgow tenements are exchanged for the post-industrial urban landscape of Berlin.  Shot on 16mm film and transferred to DVD "Horsebox" (2009) glimpses the life journey of what Jakobsdóttir describes as an 'imaginary object' as it makes its way from a wood workshop through streets still inscribed with allusions to the Wedding district's electricity-producing heyday.  At first resembling an instructional documentary, the film's rational narrative subtly slips into the absurd as two workers process the large box-like object through the city. A crate, a sideboard, a magician's stand, a coffin; any potential use value is undermined, the pale blank surface and simple construction defying identification. Only when minds wander do such objects pop into consciousness. Through film Jakobsdóttir has rendered the amorphous notion manifest, inserting it into the viewer's imagination to continue its journey. 
 
Born in Selfoss, Iceland, Elín Jakobsdóttir is currently based in Glasgow and Berlin.

"Hinges Between Days" is curated by Kirsten Lloyd.

Stills, Scotland's Center for Photography, Edinburgh
23 Cockburn Street
Edinburgh
Scotland
EH1 1BP

T +44.131.622 6200