OPENING BERLIN & COLOGNE: ONE / OTHER – Self-Portraits and Portraits

OPENING BERLIN & COLOGNE:

ONE / OTHER – Self-Portraits and Portraits

December 2, 2016 – February 4, 2017

Margret – Chronicle of an Affair, 1970/08/21, 1970, vintage print, 9 x 13 cm

Opening in Cologne & Berlin: 
Friday, 2.12., 6–9 pm

featuring works by:
Morton Bartlett, William Crawford, Margarethe Held, Paul Humphrey, Aurel Iselstöger, Alexander Lobanov, Margret, Obsession, Michail Paule, Miroslav Tichy, Type 42, Eugene von Bruenchenhein.

Thanks to the positive resonance of ONE/ other presented earlier this year at the Independent New York and OTHER/ one featured at the Independent in Brussels,

Delmes & Zander are merging the two exhibition concepts into one show featuring a selection of portraits and self-portraits simultaneously in both their Berlin and Cologne galleries. ONE / OTHER will show how the portrait as well as the self-portrait unabashedly mirrors the artist behind the work no matter if he portrays himself or whether he is portraying the other. Independently of their subject, the photographs and drawings reveal everything about their authors and their yearnings for a romanticised identity, no matter on which side of the camera or canvas. Evident in the works is a serialized, obsessive impulse to repeatedly pin down an image or identity that is manifestly idealized.

William Crawford portrays himself at the heart of his sexual fantasies: a graphic and detailed mise en scène in which Crawford is king. In his bright coloured paintings, Alexander Lobanov poses bravely, adorned by a Kalashnikov and Soviet symbolism – the image of a fearless man, a classical hero.

At times the portraits depict their authors as sufferers, preyed upon by the load of the world: Michail Paule is the threatened figure at the center of a phantasmagorical and uncanny place. Aurel Iselstöger's self-portraits illustrate him with a grotesque smile across his face, as if his mouth were torn but shut in silence, eyes to the ground. In the photo collages of Obsession, an unknown author who portrays women at the stake ready to burn or on their knees before decapitation, also pastes himself into the work both as the executioner as well as a victim.

Paul Humphrey repeatedly shuts the eyes of his subjects in the act of drawing, turning his Sleeping Beauties into docile women, innocent and powerless; Morton Bartlett shapes his dolls with his own hands, small in size and with childlike obedience, then photographs them as if for his his own private family album. The portraits of Margret, taken in the impenetrable complicity of a love affair set in the 1970s, transform her into an idealized creation of her lover and employer Günter K.. Similarly, Eugene von Bruenchenhein turns his wife Marie from exotic princess to tinseltown temptress in the photos shot in the intimacy of their hermetical domesticity.

In its painstaking rigour, the works often acquire an archival, sequential character. This is not only the case with Miroslav Tichy, who set out to photograph one hundred women a day, but also with Type 42, the encyclopedic body of anonymous work taken of female movie stars or even in Margarethe Held's lifework documented in The Uncontrollable Universe: an attempt to pin down the chaos unleashed by inner visions in a publication which brings together pictures bestowed upon her from the beyond.

In ONE / OTHER it becomes clear that the works are always an end in itself: a necessary endeavor to shape an image and to make it compatible with the artists innermost fantasies. The result is a many-layered exploration of self-reflection and an oftentimes surprising study on the means and mirrors that are chosen to make wishful thinking real,

be it in the shape of one or the other.

Press contact:

Monika Koencke

Koencke@delmes-zander.de

 

Sneak Peak - ADELHYD VAN BENDER at Sommer Contemporary Art, Israel

Exhibition view "Passiflora" Courtesy of the artist and Sommer Contemporary Art Photographer: Liat Elbling

PASSIFLORA
CURATED BY FANNY GONELLA

Adelhyd van Bender, Lina Hermsdorf, Amy Yao

12 November - 10 December 2016
at Sommer Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv

"Passiflora flowers grow in tropical and mildly warm regions, mostly in South America. The name was coined by Christian missionaries who found similarities between its form and the symbols of the passion of the Christ – its petals reminded them of the crown of thorns, among others. Meanwhile, the seeds have circulated and the flowers are growing under mild climates within Europe. Beyond its formal link with elements from the passion of the Christ, passiflora possesses medical properties such as sedative ones and can also cause uterine stimulation. This information is not accessible by looking at the flower, just like the narratives related to passiflora have faded today and do not come to mind anymore when we look at them.

We might now appreciate these flowers for their color, form or structure, yet their capacity goes beyond seductiveness. They intertwine decorative qualities with medical knowledge and a narrative context, although without direct correlation between these. The disruption between visual appearance and biological specificities they unfold underlays equally the works presented in the exhibition. These play with the discrepancy between the surface or interface they expose and the biological or technological system they refer to, leading to a fragmented approach of their content. The works are committed to an opacity that hints at potentials and threats, which are not directly palpable. Not unlike a vanitas still life, they operate along the lines of decay and maintenance, destruction and persistence.

Adelhyd van Bender (1950-2014) spent the last years of his life working on drawings that display a systematic repetition of symbols, often from chemical origin, excerpts from administrative documents, specific geometrical forms and words. He aimed at recording and conserving there the formula related to nuclear power that was contained in the uterus he assumed to carry in his body.

Lina Hermsdorf (*1985) plays with rhetorical strategies and modes of narration, engaging with characteristics of living organisms as systems that receive, store, exchange energy and information. Her work unfolds narrative threads that explore the way power structures, technology and biological structures affect each other to shape our emotional surrounding.

Amy Yao (*1977) deals with objects, colors and words to explore the materialization of circulatory fluxes – of information, people, substances or goods. Artificial and natural forms cannot be taken apart nor understood without with each other in her work, offering a reflection on certain dynamics that, behind a politically correct agency, collide with issues of social hierarchies and segregation.

The show gathers three different approaches towards power games at play in the manufacturing of our subjectivity – i.e. our relationship to ourselves. It meanders along political and economical influences that shape the communal emotional space we’re navigating through (...)."

www.sommergallery.com

MARGRET and MIROSLAV TICHY in DRESDEN at:

MARGRET and MIROSLAV TICHY will be shown in DRESDEN at:

Scham. 100 Gründe rot zu werden

Nov 26, 2016 - June 5, 2017

Deutschen Hygiene-Museum Dresden
Nov 26, 2016 - June 5, 2017

feat. works of: Margret, Danh Vō, Miroslav Tichý, Nobuyoshi Araki, Erik van Lieshout and many more.

"Mit dem Gefühl der Scham sind wir von klein auf vertraut, und auch als Erwachsene begegnen wir ihr in den unterschiedlichsten Situationen immer wieder. Kaum jemand wird sich allerdings gerne schämen – im Gegenteil: Scham ist ziemlich unangenehm. Vielleicht lohnt es sich gerade deswegen, einmal genauer hinzuschauen, was es mit diesem Gefühl auf sich hat. Meist überfällt die Scham uns ganz unmittelbar, ohne dass wir lange nachdenken müssten, warum wir uns schämen. Und löst dabei ausgesprochen körperliche Reaktionen aus: Wir beginnen zu schwitzen, werden rot oder verbergen unser Gesicht. Die Gründe, wofür und wie sehr wir uns schämen, können von Mensch zu Mensch ganz andere sein.

Scham ist aber weit mehr als ein bloß subjektives Gefühl. Psychologen und Soziologen haben ihre elementare Bedeutung für das Funktionieren von Gesellschaft beschrieben. Denn Scham verbindet das Selbstverständnis des Einzelnen unmerklich mit den Werten und Regeln einer Gemeinschaft. So trägt die Fähigkeit, Scham empfinden zu können, auch zum inneren Zusammenhalt einer Gesellschaft bei. Eines jedenfalls wird den Besucherinnen und Besuchern dieser Ausstellung klar werden: Dass wir in schamlosen Zeiten leben – wie manche Kulturkritiker meinen – ist ein gründlicher Irrtum!"

for more info please click here.


http://www.dhmd.de/index.php?id=2850

ADELHYD VAN BENDER at Sommer Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv

ADELHYD VAN BENDER, untitled, mixed media on photocopy, 1999-2014, Courtesy Delmes & Zander

Passiflora | Curator: Fanny Gonella
Adelhyd van Bender, Lina Hermsdorf, Amy Yao

Opening Event Saturday November 12th, 8pm
12th November - 10th December 2016

"Passiflora flowers grow in tropical and mildly warm regions, mostly in South America. The name was coined by Christian missionaries who found similarities between its form and the symbols of the passion of the Christ – its petals reminded them of the crown of thorns, among others. Meanwhile, the seeds have circulated and the flowers are growing under mild climates within Europe. Beyond its formal link with elements from the passion of the Christ, passiflora possesses medical properties such as sedative ones and can also cause uterine stimulation. This information is not accessible by looking at the flower, just like the narratives related to passiflora have faded today and do not come to mind anymore when we look at them.

We might now appreciate these flowers for their color, form or structure, yet their capacity goes beyond seductiveness. They intertwine decorative qualities with medical knowledge and a narrative context, although without direct correlation between these. The disruption between visual appearance and biological specificities they unfold underlays equally the works presented in the exhibition. These play with the discrepancy between the surface or interface they expose and the biological or technological system they refer to, leading to a fragmented approach of their content. The works are committed to an opacity that hints at potentials and threats, which are not directly palpable. Not unlike a vanitas still life, they operate along the lines of decay and maintenance, destruction and persistence.

Adelhyd van Bender (1950-2014) spent the last years of his life working on drawings that display a systematic repetition of symbols, often from chemical origin, excerpts from administrative documents, specific geometrical forms and words. He aimed at recording and conserving there the formula related to nuclear power that was contained in the uterus he assumed to carry in his body.

Lina Hermsdorf (*1985) plays with rhetorical strategies and modes of narration, engaging with characteristics of living organisms as systems that receive, store, exchange energy and information. Her work unfolds narrative threads that explore the way power structures, technology and biological structures affect each other to shape our emotional surrounding.

Amy Yao (*1977) deals with objects, colors and words to explore the materialization of circulatory fluxes – of information, people, substances or goods. Artificial and natural forms cannot be taken apart nor understood without with each other in her work, offering a reflection on certain dynamics that, behind a politically correct agency, collide with issues of social hierarchies and segregation.

The show gathers three different approaches towards power games at play in the manufacturing of our subjectivity – i.e. our relationship to ourselves. It meanders along political and economical influences that shape the communal emotional space we’re navigating through."

For further information please click here:
www.sommergallery.com

Sommer Contemporary Art
13 Rothschild Blvd.
Tel Aviv 66881 Israel

Tel: +972 3 5166400
info@sommergallery.com

MAN ON ROOFTOP IN L.A.

Man on Rooftop is shown in Los Angeles:

November 1966

November 12 – December 17, 2016

Blum & Poe, Los Angeles

 

Artist Unknown, Untitled, 1966, B&W photograph, 5 x 3 1/2 inches.

November 1966
Blum & Poe, Los Angeles
November 12 – December 17, 2016
Opening reception: Saturday, November 12

"Blum & Poe is pleased to present November 1966, an exhibition of self-portrait photographs created fifty years ago to the month by an unknown photographer. The twenty-eight images at hand show a shirtless man, alone on a rooftop, donning a variety of women’s bikini briefs and underwear. He is seen from multiple vantage points – some poses unassuming and others uninhibited – all the while an undercurrent of 1960s experimental, sexual whimsy pervades. What lends a strange atmosphere to these pictures is the ambiguity of the scene – nothing is known of the photographer’s intentions, the viewer is left to construe a narrative long divorced from creator and date of origin. 

The compositions go beyond their surface eroticism by documenting a carefully conceived relationship between the body of the unknown photographer/subject and the surrounding sightlines and architecture. From nearly every corner of the roof stage, we are presented with a panoramic view of the photographer’s performance. The fact that these pictures were conceived privately at the edge of building and sky, along with the subject’s commonly found closed-fist stance, frame this unknown photographer as a countercultural Superman of sorts."

For more information please click here.

http://www.blumandpoe.com/exhibitions/november-1966#images

HORST ADEMEIT in London:

Horst Ademeit is featured at the new show at BlainISouthern:

REVOLT OF THE SAGE

 24 November 2016 – 21 January 2016

at BlainISouthern in London

Horst Ademeit, untitled, inscribed polaroid, 11x9 cm. Courtesy Delmes & Zander.

Private View: 23 November, 6–8pm

featuring: Horst Ademeit, Lynn Chadwick, Hanne Darboven, Haris Epaminonda, Geoffrey Farmer, Jannis Kounellis, Mark Lewis, Goshka Macuga, Christian Marclay, Simon Moretti, David Noonan, Sigmar Polke, Erin Shirreff, Michael Simpson, John Stezaker and Paloma Varga Weisz.

"Revolt of the Sage is an exhibition featuring sixteen artists that takes its title from a work by Giorgio de Chirico painted in 1916. The Revolt of the Sage is an example of what the artist would call a ‘metaphysical interior’, and yet its crowded pictorial space overflows with ephemeral things: frames, measuring devices and biscuits. Objects pile up and overlap, while a strange perspective recedes into an irresolvable background. What did the artist mean by a ‘metaphysical interior’? In a letter to Apollinaire, written around the time he painted The Revolt of the Sage, de Chirico describes two realms: our finite condition, and its loss and longing, and a metaphysical realm where time does not exist.

It has been almost two years now since I’ve seen you. The Ephesian teaches us that time does not exist and that on the great curve of eternity the past is the same as the future. This might be what the Romans meant with their image of Janus, the god with two faces; and every night in dream, in the deepest hours of rest, the past and future appear to us as equal, memory blends with prophecy in a mysterious union.

Giorgio de Chirico to Apollinaire, July 1916

Picking up on de Chirico’s vision of a ‘metaphysical interior’, Revolt of the Sage gathers a range of artists who use collage, juxtaposition, fragments, framing devices and layered imagery to explore ruptures in time and the alluring mysteries of the everyday. The exhibition features new and existing work by contemporary artists alongside late post-War artists such as Lynn Chadwick, Hanne Darboven and Sigmar Polke.

Curated by artist-curator Simon Moretti and Craig Burnett, Blain|Southern’s Director of Exhibitions, the exhibition emerged from their shared interest in de Chirico and the thought that The Revolt of the Sage would resonate with artists whose work inhabits that chasm between the here and now and a dream of ‘the great curve of eternity’ that we might perceive in a small, measurable work of art.

On the occasion of the exhibition, Blain|Southern will publish a book that features a newly commissioned interview between art historian Ara H. Merjian and philosopher Jesse Prinz, alongside existing texts by Giorgio de Chirico, John Ashbery, Lydia Davis, Apollinaire and others.

Participating artists: Horst Ademeit, Lynn Chadwick, Hanne Darboven, Haris Epaminonda, Geoffrey Farmer, Jannis Kounellis, Mark Lewis, Goshka Macuga, Christian Marclay, Simon Moretti, David Noonan, Sigmar Polke, Erin Shirreff, Michael Simpson, John Stezaker and Paloma Varga Weisz."

For more information please click here. 

 http://www.blainsouthern.com/exhibitions/2016/revolt-of-the-sage