THE ELECTRIC EYE at La Casa Encendida in Madrid

Adelhyd Van Bander, Folder #21, 1999-2014
Courtesy Delmes & Zander, Cologne

 The Electric Eye 

11 October, 2019 - 05 January, 2020   

La Casa Encendida, Madrid

"The Electric Eye, curated by Antonia Gaeta and Pilar Soler, revolves around a series of works that use the artistic language to reveal an enigmatic journey, a to-ing and fro-ing between several dimensions or between a visible and an invisible reality. Encrypted messages using cosmological structures provide a glimpse into diverse realities and worlds, often deliberately dark and characterised by complex iconographies.

The key to these works resides in the meeting between forms and meanings that bring together tutelary entities and figures. It is a project about the mystery in meanings and hidden presences. The exhibition dramatises these elements as transient memories, materialised as multiple, complex realities, specific calculations, pyramids of power, apathies abated with the concretion of a visionary mission.

Above all, the show presents visitors with a provocative impossibility: the inability to decipher the entire message behind the works, because in many cases the artists act as mediators between the rational world and another unknown or transcendental world. The works therefore become narratives of the subconscious, inadvertently assuming aspects that subvert the established. Through a variety of coded messages, formulas, invented figures and secret codes, they question the limits of reason. There is always some hidden aspect that becomes an enigma and emerges as the only possible space of liberation in the face of its pathological condition. Conceived on these lines, the exhibition demonstrates the power of subjective processes, compulsive obsessions and fantastical visions."

"The exhibition presents selected works from the Treger/Saint Silvestre Collection, one of the richest and most comprehensive collections of art brut in Europe, housed at the Centro de Arte Oliva in São João da Madeira, Portugal."

The exhibition includes works by Horst Ademeit, Adelhyd van Bender, Adolf Wölfli, Agatha Wojciechowsky, Margarethe Held, Madge Gill, Anna Zeimánková, Nina Karasek, Bruly Bouabré, Albino Braz, Vasilij Romanenkov, Aníbal Brizuela, Janko Domsic, John Urho Kemp, Herald Stoffers, Melvin Way, Beverly Baker, Raimundo Camilo, Scottie Wilson, Lesage, Fleury-Joseph Crépin and Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern.

For further information about the exhibition: https://www.lacasaencendida.es/en/exhibitions/electric-eye-9602 

Installation view of ALEXANDRU CHIRA. INTO THE LAB LAND

Installation View of ALEXANDRU CHIRA, INTO THE LAB LAND

Photos by Johannes Post, Courtesy Delmes & Zander, Cologne

THE ASSEMBLED HUMAN at the Folkwang Museum, Essen

George Widener, Time Machine, 2010, Mixed media on canvas, 184 x 139 cm, Collection Torsten Kunert, Copyright George Widener / Courtesy Delmes & Zander, Cologne, Foto: Bernhard Schaub. 

THE ASSEMBLED HUMAN

8 November, 2019 - 15 March, 2020

Museum Folkwang, Essen

“In late autumn 2019, Museum Folkwang will present a show that transcends media and epochs to explore the major societal issues and upheavals of the last 150 years. The Assembled Human presents art as a mirror of industrialisation, technologisation and digitisation. It provides a cultural-historical survey that encompasses key works of painting and graphic design, early experiments in photography, installations and films, along with recent works of Post-Internet Art.

The exhibition focuses on the manifold entanglements between human beings and machines, which are explored in several thematic sections. From the Industrial Revolution to the Information Age, generations of artists have dealt with technological innovations and their impact on humankind. The international loans shown in the exhibition range from photographic records of early industrialisation to Modernist art. They cover experiments in video and performance art from the 1960s through to contemporary art – because today more than ever, technological progress is inextricably linked with anxieties over losses of freedom and individuality. Contemporary works reflect current artistic investigations into the new possibilities and impossibilities that the digital age entails.“ 

The show includes works by Walter Heinz Allner, Bettina von Arnim, Gerd Arntz, Ed Atkins, Giacomo Balla, Joachim Bandau, Lenora de Barros, Willi Baumeister, Thomas Bayrle, Rudolf Belling, Ella Bergmann-Michel, Renato Bertelli, Alexandra Bircken, Umberto Boccioni, Wilhelm Braune, John Cage, Helen Chadwick, Computer Technique Group (CTG), Charles A. Csuri, Mariechen Danz, Fortunato Depero, Walter Dexel, Otto Dix, Marcel Duchamp, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Charles & Ray Eames, Max Ernst, Alexandra Exter, Öyvind Fahlström, Harun Farocki, William Allan Fetter, Otto Fischer, Herbert W. Franke, Carl Grossberg, George Grosz, Richard Hamilton, Barbara Hammer, Sidsel Meineche Hansen, Raoul Hausmann, John Heartfield, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Eva Hesse, Heinrich Hoerle, Rebecca Horn, Vilmos Huszár, Boris Ignatowitsch, Fritz Kahn, Wassily Kandinsky, Anne-Mie van Kerckhoven, Friedrich Kiesler, Konrad Klapheck, Jürgen Klauke, Heinrich Kley, Josh Kline, Iwan Kljun, Alexander Kluge, Kiki Kogelnik, Germaine Krull, Boris Kudojarow, Helmuth Kurth, Jürgen van Kranenbrock, Maria Lassnig, Fernand Léger, Alice Lex-Nerlinger, Roy Lichtenstein, El Lissitzky, Hilary Lloyd, Goshka Macuga, René Magritte, Kasimir Malewitsch, Man Ray, Étienne-Jules Marey, Rémy Markowitsch, Caroline Mesquita, László Moholy-Nagy, Johannes Molzahn, Alexei Morgunow, Martin Munkácsi, Eadweard Muybridge, Otto Neurath, Katja Novitskova, ORLAN, Tony Oursler, Trevor Paglen, Nam June Paik, Eduardo Paolozzi, Georgi Petrusow, Antoine Pevsner, Walter Pichler, Jon Rafman, Robert Rauschenberg, Timm Rautert, Alexander Rodtschenko, Thomas Ruff, Walter Ruttmann, James Shaffer, Arkadi Schaichet, Xanti Schawinsky, Helmut Schenk, Oskar Schlemmer, Nicolas Schöffer, Franz Wilhelm Seiwert, Avery Singer, Stelarc, Friedemann von Stockhausen, Thayaht, Paul Thek, Jean Tinguely, Patrick Tresset, Anna Uddenberg, Erwin Wendt, Hugo von Werden, George Widener. 

As the exhibition explores a wide spectrum of topics and artists discussing societal issues of the last 150 years, it is divided into 18 different chapters such as “War and Acceleration”, "The X-Rayed Human” and back to “Industrial Worlds of Work”. 

Discover the different chapters of the exhibition here.

For further information about the exhibition visit:
www.museum-folkwang.de

Screening of RALFS FARBEN by Lukas Marxt at the Duisburger Filmwoche

RALFS FARBEN
R: Lukas Marxt
DE/AT 2019 | 74 Min.

Screening at Duisburger Filmwoche

Tuesday November 5th, 2019

"Ralf says at one point: “We can’t use the same light, we have to use completely new keys with completely new light and even these can be found to a limited extent”. The schizophrenic man’s words accompany much of this experimental portrait by Lukas Marxt (who worked in close cooperation with Michael Petri over a period of four years), layered over footage of Lanzarote, where the protagonist lives in seclusion. Landscape and cinema form an amalgam here, being both interior spaces of thought and feeling, and projected images of an outside. The thinking of the film’s main character does not run along straight lines, moving instead in circles, spirals, and Möbius strips, shaping the overall structure of the film: the viewer gets lost in this space, in time, in distances, searching in vain for a position in the actual physical sense, finding it instead (and as the result of this uncertainty) in an attitude, a specific formation of thinking which—paradoxically—is permanently moving, in a “succession of changing states” (Deleuze).

Stasis in motion, ongoing but frozen, a painting in time, Rousseau and Tarkovsky, a thought that takes shape in the process of thinking. Documentary? Science-fiction? Mindfuck? It is dizzyingly hard to describe what one sees and hears, because the reality in front of the camera could also be a wholly imagined future, or pictures from a time before cinema. In this film, language, writing, pictures, and music are both understated and exuberant, emptied and too full to generate meaning in the conventional sense. As if asleep, but more awake than ever, we look at the world, Ralf’s world, in which children are “built” and lives are “written,” a “half-fantasy” and a “new life” in which the weather is “recomputed,” like in a movie. Cinematographic madness and a precise portrait of a human being, dancing in the wind of Lanzarote, in the night, in the stroboscopic flickering of a streetlamp, in a completely new light."

Alejandro Bachmann, film scholar

This year the artists film has already been shown at the The Filmfestival Viennale in Vienna, the Festival du nouveau cinéma in Montreal where it won the Prix des nouveaux alchimistes and the Prix de l'expérimentation MUBI, as well as the International Film Festival in Locarno and lastly this month at the Duisburger Filmweek.  

For further informations visit: www.ralfsfarben.com 

For informations about the artist visit: lukasmarxt.com