Installation views of Bruno Schleinstein at Ebensperger Berlin

Installation views of Bruno Schleinstein, Photos by Ludger Paffrath, Courtesy of Ebensperger 

RALF'S FARBEN by Lukas Marxt as part of the exhibition "RALF LÜDDEMANN | Dead Is The Dog Shouts The Hare And Stays At Home"

Lukas Marxt, RALF'S FARBEN, DE 2019, 74 min 

on view at

RALF LÜDDEMANN
Tot ist der Hund ruft der Hase und bleibt zu Hause

(Dead Is The Dog Shouts The Hare And Stays At Home)
December 4, 2020 – January 23, 2021

"Ralf's Colors is an experimental portrait of a schizophrenic person living in Lanzarote (Canary islands), whom I accompanied for over 7 years. The film shows the struggle of his inner life in contrast to the deserted volcanic surroundings."

Lukas Marxt

"“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,” says Ralf at one point. 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"

Find out more about the film: www.ralfsfarben.com

Aperture Foundation Photobook Awards 2020

 

Frankenstein's Bloody Terror, Type 42 (anonymous), 1960s-1970s, mixed media on polaroid, 8.3 x 10.8 cm

Winner of the Catalogue of The Year 2020 at the Photobook Awards on occasion of the Paris Photo - Aperture Foundation 

“IMAGINING EVERYDAY LIFE: ENGAGEMENTS WITH VERNACULAR PHOTOGRAPHY”
 published by The Walther Collection

"The book Imagining Everyday Life - a new story enriched with the origins and characteristics of vernacular photography - grew out of a two-day symposium, organized by the Walther Collection at Columbia University in 2018. With scholars and critics from foreground evolving in different disciplines and regional perspectives aiming to reconsider the ordinary image through the prism of power, identity, political participation and ideology, new narratives hitherto largely ignored or erased are coming enrich the traditional reading of the vernacular. By redefining this photograph by its social function rather than by its aesthetic characteristics, and by an exploration of the means available, Imagining Everyday Life offers a much more detailed and extensive account of the history and role of vernacular photography. Richly illustrated and supported by texts "rigorous without being heavy", Imagining Everyday Life is, according to Joshua Chuang , member of the pre-jury, a real "essential re-examination of the subject". Lucy Conticello , member of the final jury, adds: “The quality of the research, its insightful contributions from a large number of archives and collections, as well as its high quality reproductions, make this book a reference work on vernacular photography.""

Find out more about the winning book: 
https://delpireandco.com/imagining-everyday-life-engagements-with-vernacular-photography-3/

Find out more about the Photobook Award at Delpire and Co: https://delpireandco.com/les-prix-du-livre-paris-photo-aperture-foundation-2020/ 

Type 42 (anonymous) at Delpire & co in Paris, on occasion of the Paris Photo – Aperture Foundation Photobook Awards 2020

 

Fame is the name of the game, Type 42 (anonymous), 1960s-1970s,
mixed media on polaroid, 8.3 x 10.8 cm

"Delpire & Co presents the books selected for the Prix du Livre Paris Photo - Aperture Foundation 2020. Awarded since 2012, the Prizes reward the best photographic books published in the year, in three categories: First Book Prize, Book Prize of the year, Prize for the best exhibition catalog. A prize of $ 10,000 is presented to the winner of the First Book Prize. 

35 books were selected by a pre-jury which met in New York in September 2020, among the some 700 books received from around the world following a call for applications. This pre-jury consisted of Joshua Chuang (Associate Director for Arts and Photography, New York Public Library), Lesley A. Martin (Creative Director, Aperture), Susan Meiselas (President, Magnum Foundation), Sarah Meister (Curator for photography, MoMA), and Oluremi C. Onabanjo (independent curator).

20 books are selected in the first book category, 10 in the book of the year category, and 5 in the catalog of the year category. The entire selection is available for sale in the Delpire & co bookstore." 

Find out more about the nominated books here: https://delpireandco.com/les-prix-du-livre-paris-photo-aperture-foundation-2020/

“Imagining Everyday Life” featuring polaroids by Type 42 (Anonymous), published by Walther Collection is among 5 shortlisted in the category Photography Catalogue of the Year. 

Find out more about "Imagining Everyday Life" here:  www.walthercollection.com/en/collection/publications/imagining-everyday-life

RALF LÜDDEMANN I Tot ist der Hund ruft der Hase und bleibt zu Hause

 

 

Ralf Lüddemann, war for rain in end is no end, inkjet print, 76 x 192 cm

RALF LÜDDEMANN
TOT IST DER HUND RUFT DER HASE UND BLEIBT ZU HAUSE
(DEAD IS THE DOG SHOUTS THE HARE AND STAYS AT HOME)
December 4, 2020 – January 23, 2021

Extended Exhibition Opening
Friday, December 4, 11 am – 8 pm
Saturday, December 5, 11 am – 8 pm
Sunday, December 6, 12 am – 6 pm

“Ralf and I have been working together for five years. Since falling ill with schizophrenia, he now lives a self-imposed “life of punishment” on Lanzarote. He spends his whole time building planetary offices and is responsible for holding the entire world. He is king, he can travel into the future and the past, but he’s caught in what he calls the FIX. I have conducted and recorded many conversations with him. In the last year, he has begun painting images with MSPaint; he refers to these as the “daily keys.” His approach is oriented, amongst other things, around the principle of painting by numbers, where he uses the pixel grid to interpret and justify past and future events.” 

(Email from Lukas Marxt to Delmes & Zander, 18.01.2018)

Ralf Lüddemann (*1964) lives in Salzgitter throughout his childhood and adolescence. In 1984 he learns the trade of an orthopaedic mechanic, which he practices for six years. In 1990 his career takes a different path when he qualifies as an assistant flying instructor, and two years later he begins working as a paragliding instructor. In 1995 he opens a school for hang gliding and paragliding in Goslar. Following a long stay in hospital, he is forced to shut the school in 2003. He moves to Lanzarote in 2004, where he still lives today. The first, coincidental encounter between Ralf Lüddemann and the artist Lukas Marxt comes in 2012. In the years that follow, an intensive exchange develops between the two, in the course of which they produce the film Ralfs Farben (Ralf’s Colours, DE/AT 2019, 74 min) together. Ralf Lüddemann has been creating digital images since 2017.

He is the first artist in Delmes & Zander’s programme with an exclusively digital body of work.

Bruno Schleinstein @Ebensperger

 

Bruno Schleinstein, Entwurf Nr. 3, 1997, mixed media on paper, 42 x 29.7 cm

Bruno Schleinstein is part of the group show 

Freedom & Independence at the Ebensperger Gallery

  

"John Bock, Jörg Buttgereit, Bonnie Camplin, Christeene, Lea Draeger, Tim Etchells, Heiner Franzen, Assaf Gruber, Yuki Jungesblut, Sandro Kopp, Bjørn Melhus, Otto Muehl, Hajnal Németh, Bruno Schleinstein et al.

The exhibition “Freedom & Independence” borrows its name from Bjørn Melhus’ eponymous film Freedom & Independence from 2014. It will use its title as both, a motto and a theme, while understanding ‘freedom’ and ‘independence’ as value and virtue. Being an ever evolving show works will be added to the exhibition over the course of its yet indefinite duration.

It is conceived with Mehlus’ film at its core: This experimental short questions the current global ideological paradigm shifts towards new forms of religious capitalism by confronting ideas and quotes of the self-proclaimed objectivist philosopher and novelist Ayn Rand with evangelical contents of US-American mainstream movies.

The exhibition will examine themes implied by the film and draw variations from other artists’ contributions. They will be juxtaposed with Freedom & Independence in and at its centre. The works will range from spacial to drawings, from photographs to paintings. The size of the premises allow extensive installations that might change over the course of the show's duration."

The gallery is open daily around the clock only by appointment. 

For more information click here

Accrochage at the Gallery

 

Agatha Wojciechowsky, untitled, undated, chalk on paper, 60.5 x 45.3 cm

Accrochage at the Gallery from October 28th, 2020 with works from Agatha Wocjciechowsky, Helga Goetze and Alexandru Chira. Stop by to see it! 

 

Agatha Wojciechowsky was born in 1896, in Steinach, Germany. According to her own statement she experienced her first visions at the age of four. In 1923 she emigrated to the United States, where she worked as a maid, a seamstress, a laundress, and a kitchen helper in various hotels. After World War II, she became a well-known spiritual medium and a healer to a small circle of insiders. In 1951, she began to draw countless mediumistic drawings in which eerie spectral faces can be perceived through a maze of abstract forms and graphic symbols. “Mona”, the ghost of an American Indian girl, appeared to her one day and she began to draw according to Mona's instructions: “Take a small pencil, place it on a sheet of paper and watch what happens, immediately it, and I, began to draw and we drew and drew for a long time”. This is how Agatha Wojciechowsky describes the beginning of her artistic activity.

Helga Goetze (* 1922 Magdeburg, Germany, † 2008 Winsen, Germany), also known as Helga Sophia, was a German artist, writer and political activist, who lived and worked in Hamburg and Berlin. In 1972 she founded the Institute for Sex Information and published her first poetry collection Hausfrau der Nation oder Deutschlands Supersau (Housewife of the Nation or Germany’s Super Sow). Later on, Goetze kept close contact with the commune founded by the Vienna performance artist Otto Mühl and was actively associated with the Hamburg cultural centre “Fabrik”. After moving to Berlin in 1978, the artist started to maintain daily protest pickets in favour of women’s sexual liberation in front of the Technical University as well as the Berlin Gedächtniskirche. In Berlin, she also founded the “Geni(t)al University”, a gallery and open museum. Conversations with Rosa von Praunheim inspired her to make the film Rote Liebe (Red Love) in 1982. With the 1982 TV show Neue Nackte, neue Einsichten (New Nudes, New Insights), where she undressed in front of the camera, and several appearances on TV talk shows during the 1990ies, Goetze challanged the public debate around sexuality in the media. In 2000, she founded the association Metropole Mutterstadt e.V. (Metropolis Mother City) with a group of friends and in 2003, Monika A. Wojtyllo made a film about the artist, titled Sticken und Ficken (Embroidery and Fucking).

Alexandru Chira (1947, Tauseni, Romania - 2011, Bucharest, Romania), who was native of a small village in Transilvania, realized that the new idols of mechanized agriculture (tractors, threshers etc.) proved inefficient when faced with the tough limits of nature - his home village suffered of yearlong drought. Chira started to elaborate a sophisticated system of land-and-weather improving art equipment, a series of staggering, symbolic installations of painted metal, wire, and concrete. Their task was "to bring rain and rainbow", to convey prosperity, and prevent deluge. Later on, during the 1990s, already a university professor and acclaimed artist, Chira succeeded in accomplishing his lifelong dream: the ensemble in Tauseni, the biggest one-man-monument in Transylvania. Most of his prior (and later) works, either those on canvas or the drawings and objects are inspiring sketches or derivative works related to the monument. Maturing his art-agrarian fascination for decades, the monomaniac Chira deepened in the diverse branches of practical knowledge and spiritual speculation requested by such a bold plan. Architecture, design, astronomy, history, magic, UFO-logy, mysticism, shamanism, and theosophy conjoined in an effort to strengthen the material and immaterial assets of the project. Nothing is left to chance in his painted graphs. Their apparent visual geomancy is grounded on a peculiar conjunction of human will, sheer transcendence, and natural forces.

Last Weeks of the exhibition "Dream Baby Dream" at Haus Mödrath

 

Morton Bartlett, untitled, ca. 1950, pencil on parchment, 43 x 35,5 cm

 

Don't miss the last weeks of the exhibition 

"Dream Baby Dream" at Haus Mödrath, curated by Gesine Borcherdt

"The childhood home is a place of fantasy, protection, and play. But it can also be one of trauma, violence, and fear. The home is where it’s decided who we are, what will become of us, and what we will repress. For many artists, the impulse to create is rooted in childhood. Through art, they transmute their early and ingrained experiences into something bigger, something that renews, expands, and transforms our perspective on the world.

The exhibition Dream Baby Dream features artists whose work arises from just such an imaginative power. They all evince a strong connection to childhood and youth, not just as a source of creative inspiration, but also as a metaphor for physical, psychological, and social conflicts. The interplay of the artists creates an atmosphere in which the dark sides of childhood and youth take on entirely new forms.

The show’s title refers to a song by the influential electronic duo Suicide, pioneers of post-punk and of what would later become techno. The song’s dark sound, paired with Alan Vega’s Elvis-like voice, turns the American Dream that still haunts us today into a nightmarish loop—and at the same time a trance-like, shimmering hope. Here, rebellion and desire, fear and fantasy interlink. (...)"

The exhibition features among others Morton Bartlett, Charlemagne Palestine, Veit Laurent Kurz

For more information visit the page of the museum here.

Last Week of "Lusofolia: A Beleza Insensata" at Centro de Arte Oliva

Jesuys Crystiano, untitled, undated, mixed media on paper, 150 x 219,5 cm

 

It is currently the last week of the show
"Lusofolia: A Beleza Insensata" at Centro de Arte Oliva in S. João da Madeira, curated by António Saint Sivestre

The show features among others Evaristo Rodrigues, Jesuys Crystiano, José Teófilo Resende and Marilena Pelosi.

The life and work of Jesuys Crystiano are only documented after 2010, at which time he was living on the streets of Ilheus (Bahia) and taken care of by neighbors. How Crystiano ended up here still remains unclear. It was then that a German hotel owner who lived in the area first caught sight of his monumental wall drawings in abandoned buildings. From then on he continuously supported and documented Crystiano's artistic output and took him in until Crystiano's death in 2015.

Hundreds of coals and pencil drawings, some of them in large format, collages, objects and notebooks were produced during this period. In his drawings he invents surreal worlds which he puts on paper with an secure and dynamic trace. Airplanes, crowned vultures, fish, umbrellas, upside-down chairs and tables, as well as uprooted tree trunks are the recurring subjects of his drawings.

For more information visit the page of the museum here.

Moritz Scheper's Guide to DC Open!

Tomasz Machcinski, untitled, 2012, digital print on baryta paper, 30 x 21 cm

We are thrilled to be included in Moritz Scheper's guide to the best shows in Düsseldorf and Cologne

"This exhibition by Polish autodidact photographer and performer Tomasz Machcinski presents 30 photographs, dating from the 1970s to the present day, in which the artist assumes the guise of various historical figures, pop icons or alter egos in eccentric outfits. Instead of fitting into a well-composed mise-en-scène, he depicts the ageing processes of his body. Several videos, in which Machcinski dresses up as an entertainer and performs songs he has written (for example, 7 Wench, 2013), appear to offer a camouflage for his crossdressing, which was prohibited during Poland’s socialist era until 1989 and is again under threat after the country’s most recent turn to the conservative right." Moritz Scheper

 
Read the full guide here.

TOMASZ MACHCINSKI I With Love to Tommy

Tomasz Machcinski, untitled, 2005, Vintage photography, 15 x 10 cm

 

TOMASZ MACHCINSKI

With Love to Tommy

September 4 – October 24, 2020

Opening: 04.09., 11 am – 10 pm

A magic trick is immediately obvious. A bad trick exposes itself as such, while a good one instantly draws you in. 

For a long time I considered whether the selfie should play a role in this text. Whether this sort of image, perhaps the most banal of our time, actually has anything at all to do with the work of the artist. After all, while he doesn’t want to be an artist, he naturally is one nonetheless, this Tomasz Machcinski, from the small Polish city of Kalisz. 

But there is a video on YouTube of Machcinski in which he explains how he first made an image of himself, sometime in the mid-’60s of the last century. And how this older man now stands there in his front room, around 60 years later, and once again stretches out his arm, camera in hand, to shoot himself – so there it is. Machcinski doesn’t use the word selfie, of course; he speaks of light and shadow, of faces and figures and poetry. “I create figures that have lived, that do live, and some which are still to be born,” he says.

The earliest online use of the word “selfie” can be traced back to 2002. It describes a photographic self-portrait, often taken at arm’s length from one’s own hand. The Oxford English Dictionary declared the term its “Word of the Year” in 2013. Since then, it has also stood as a codeword for the act of working on oneself; for the permanent pressure to perform one’s own life; for the spiral of public staging; for the always more beautiful self; for the cult of the body; and for a schizophrenic relationship to media, and online narcissism. Today, 30 percent of young people see becoming famous as an explicit goal in life; 10 years ago, it was 14%.

Tomasz Machcinski is not famous. Did he want to be? Machcinski was born in 1942. He is the only man on the planet with 1000 faces; 22,000, to be exact. Since taking the first photograph of himself, Machcinski has repeatedly staged himself in new roles. “I is another,” the poet Arthur Rimbaud wrote in 1871, in the second of his so-called “Seer Letters.” And this is perhaps the greatest question of Machcinski’s unbelievable body of work: whether he really has been photographing himself for 60 years now, or 22,000 others. Machcinski has previously transformed himself into Charlie Chaplin, Marx, Lenin, a long-haired junkie with needle, a sheikh with pointed beard, a prisoner with shaved head, a young priest with sacrament, a soldier with pipe, a film noir police commissioner, a Nazi commander, a bearded biker, a bard with guitar, D'Artagnan with rapier and red hat, a bearded biker with steel helmet, “Che” Guevara, a hippie, the Pope, Caesar, a half-Hitler, Jesus. In addition, countless fantasy and historical figures, a knight, a cowboy, a policeman. And when he dresses as a woman – as Mother Theresa, a glamorous Hollywood actress, a woman shopping – Machcinski seems somehow even better, more exalted, more diverse. 

One sees the passing of time in his pictures – analogue black-and-white photographs from the ’60s and ’70s, later on digital photos. A young man, an old one. But their allure stems from the relationship between virtuosity and infirmity: at some point he loses teeth and gains a hunch; he wears no wig, his hair simply how it is, sometimes long, sometimes short; his chin sometimes covered by a massive beard, at others smooth. It is always both him and another that we see – an obsessive, overwhelming confusion of authenticity and artificiality. And the work of an amateur: all of these images he produced alone. Looking through them, the artist, who sometimes exhibits his scars and bodily infirmities and sometimes hides them, appears rich. The perfection of many images, his gaze, the light, the contours of his glamorous face. His 22,000 faces create a mood that irradiates out of the images. It speaks of old Hollywood – a camp, knowing otherworld; a fragile tight-rope dandy.

It was in the small Polish city where the artist has now lived for 80 years – his whole life – that the photo first reached him that started it all. On the photograph, sent to him in 1947 by the actress Joan Tompkins, stood the message, “With love to Tommy. Joan ‘Mother’ Tompkins.” Until he was 20 years old, the artist was convinced that the great Hollywood actress was in fact his actual mother. He then learned that, as a war orphan, he had been part of an “remote adoption programme.” It was the end of his dream. What is real? What is not? What is a self? Machcinski’s pictures leave all of these questions in pieces.

 - Timo Feldhaus

Horst Ademeit im Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt!

Horst Ademeit, untitled, 06.07.1993, inscribed polaroid, 11 x 9 cm

Horst Ademeit in der Ausstellung "Sammlung"  (22. August-30. Mai 2020) im 

Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt

Mit Silvia Bächli, Sammy Baloji, Éric Baudelaire, Thomas Bayrle, Vija Celmins, Marlene Dumas, Isa Genzken, Tishan Hsu, Anne Imhof, Barry Le Va, Lee Lozano, Bruce Nauman, Cady Noland, Marcel Odenbach u.a.

"(...) Hände, Mienenspiel, Wortwahl und Betonung formen ein politisches und kulturelles Vokabular, das Martine Syms räumlich in einen Dialog mit den Betrachter_innen setzt. Und während Horst Ademeit, Thomas Ruff und Jeff Wall in ihren Arbeiten minutiös Identifizierung und Beobachtung als Grundlagen von Überwachung untersuchen, verhandeln Marlene Dumas, Sammy Baloji, Thomas Bayrle und Tishan Hsu in ihren Arbeiten Religion und Ritual, Körpertechnologie und Geschlecht. Die Ausstellung zeigt Werke aus der Sammlung des MMK von den frühen 1960er-Jahren bis zu zeitgenössischen und jüngst erworbenen Werken."

Mehr Informationen erhalten Sie hier.

Alexandru Chira in der Efremidis Gallery

Alexandru Chira, Study XVI, 1984, Öl auf Leinwand, 90 x 56,5 cm

Alexandru Chira als Teil der Tony Just Ausstellung "Our Inchoate Love" in der Efremidis Gallery, kuratiert von Tenzing Barshee

Das Monopol Magazin veröffentlichte eine spannende Rezension der aktuellen Tony Just Ausstellung mit Werken von Alexandru Chira:

"(...) Da ist jemand, der die Malerei gerade erfährt, anfängt, sie im wahrsten Sinne zu begreifen und mit ihr in eine neue, magische, fast romantische Beziehung zu treten. Wie es der Titel "Our inchoate love" andeutet, geht es um eine beginnende, unfertige, im Entstehen begriffene Liebe. Das auf einer zartgelb leuchtenden Wandmalerei platzierte Sonnenbild "Aphrodite giver of blessings" (2020) wirkt wie ein vorzeitlicher Hochzeitsaltar. Justs monochrome, in Gelb, Violett oder Pink gehaltenen drip images haben organische Strukturen wie Äste, Adern. Sie könnten Eingänge zu einer anderen Welt sein, magische Portale.

Um diesen Eindruck noch zu verstärken, hat Tenzing Barshee, der die Schau mit Just zusammenstellte, noch zwei Bilder des rumänischen Künstlers und Visionärs Alexandru Chira (1947- 2011) von der Kölner Galerie Delmes & Zander ausgeliehen, die sich auf sogenannte "Outsider Art" spezialisiert. In einem kleinen Dorf in Transsylvanien geboren, entwickelte Chira als junger Künstler ein aufwändiges System von Kunstobjekten und symbolischen Bildern, um den Boden zu verbessern und wegen der anhaltenden Dürre den Regen zu beschwören. In Korrespondenz mit Justs Wandmalereien, für die er auch die japanische Heilmethode Reiki nutzt, hängen nun im Fenster der Galerie zwei Bilder Chiras, die erstaunlich dekorativ aussehen.

"Chiras Praxis orientierte sich dabei an bestimmten Vorstellungen von schamanischen Prinzipien, aber auf ziemlich verrückte Weise", erklärt Barshee, "denn er versuchte, mit seiner Kunst tatsächlich das Wetter zu kontrollieren. Er wollte mit seiner Arbeit die Erde heilen. Das ist im Hinblick auf Tonys Werk interessant, in dem Heilung heute ebenfalls ein ganz zentrales Thema ist. Wenn man Chiras Vorstellung von spiritueller Kontrolle anschaut, verhält es sich bei Tony eigentlich genau umgekehrt. Für ihn war es eine aufregende Erfahrung, mit all diesen unterschiedlichen Möglichkeiten zu experimentieren, um seine Bücher und Gemälde zu machen – und dabei eben viel weniger Kontrolle darüber zu haben, was da für ein Bild entsteht. Er erkannte dadurch, wie befreiend es sein kann, die Kontrolle aufzugeben. (...)"

Oliver Koerner von Gustorf

Den vollständigen Artikel können Sie hier lesen.

New study on Horst Ademeit

Horst Ademeit, untitled, 04.02.1994, edited polaroid, 11 x 9 cm.

A thrilling case study on Horst Ademeit by Rosanna Mclaughlin

"Rosanna Mclaughlin is a writer, editor, and cultural critic. Her criticism has been featured in publications including Frieze magazine and The Guardian. She is the author of the book Double-Tracking: Studies is Duplicity, published by Carcanet Press. She is an editor at The White Review."

Rosanna Mclaughlin has chosen a selection of Polaroid’s taken by Horst Ademeit as the subject of her study as part of Study Series, intiated by the David Roberts Art Foundation. DRAF are a series of focused case-studies of works from the David Roberts Collection. Each presentation centres on a single work or series.

Read the full study here.

Bruno Schleinstein I Warten ist der Tod

Bruno Schleinstein, untitled, undated, mixed media on paper, 42 x 30 cm

Bruno Schleinstein

Warten ist der Tod
July 18 – August 22, 2020
Opening July 17th, 6 - 9pm

“What must the itinerant traveller think when he dreams he’s home again – and is awoken by a song from his own country only to see that he’s in a foreign land.” (Bruno Schleinstein)

Bruno Schleinstein is born in 1932 in Berlin, the youngest of three illegitimate children. Unable to cope with the responsibility of raising her young child, his mother gives him over to the custody of a children’s home when he is just three years old. He lives there for the following six years. As a so-called Reichsausschusskind (a designation for mentally and physically disabled children deemed “unworthy of life” under the NS euthanasia programme), he is transferred to the Wiesengrund educational facility at the Bonhoeffer Nerve Clinic in Berlin in 1941. Doctors employed at Wiesengrund are by this time already performing medical experiments on the children that often end in the latter’s deaths. There is no record of whether any such experiments were performed on Schleinstein himself. What is certain, however, is that he can describe the operations carried out on the children there in detail.

Schleinstein remains locked up even after the war’s end. Following several unsuccessful escape attempts, he is transferred to a psychiatric hospital for children in 1947, justified on the grounds of his “obdurate tendency for escape.” In 1955, he finally succeeds in escaping from the facility and travels to Baden-Baden. He returns to Berlin in 1963 and finds a job at the Borsig-Werken, where he remains employed until his retirement.

An advertising display board for the company Asbach Uralt featuring a Moritaten (street ballad) singer gives Schleinstein the idea of taking up the profession himself. From this point on he spends his weekends wandering the city’s rear courtyards, where he performs music with an accordion and glockenspiel. He also illustrates his songs with his own painted display boards. An employee of the Akademie der Künste becomes aware of Schleinstein and invites him to participate in a Moritaten festival being held there. Schleinstein makes his first record, through which the filmmaker Lutz Eichholz becomes aware of the singer. This leads to his first film: 1966’s Bruno the Black. 

In 1973, Werner Herzog, who has just finished writing the script for his film The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser and is seeking to cast the lead role of Hauser himself, sees Eichholz’s film during a screening by the German public broadcaster ARD. Herzog is fascinated by Schleinstein’s authentic and unaffected personality and contacts the artist, subsequently casting him in the lead role under the stage name Bruno S. The film is screened as a German contribution to the 1975 Cannes Film Festival and is awarded the Grand Prix by the jury. In 1977, Bruno S. again plays the lead role in Herzog’s film Stroszek – a role written especially for him by the director. Bruno Schleinstein becomes a global star. Despite this, he continues to work as a forklift operator during the week and to spend his weekends playing music in courtyards. He draws and paints continuously. The first exhibition of Schleinstein’s pictures takes place in a Berlin bar in 1983, with his first gallery exhibition following a year later at endart gallery in the Berlin district of Kreuzberg. Delmes & Zander exhibits Schleinstein’s paintings and drawings from the late 1990s on. They are shown with great success at international art fairs and in both solo and group exhibitions. It is his fellow artists that are most fascinated with the authenticity and directness of his work, however. As an autodidact who taught himself to play music, to draw and to paint, and who always strove to perfect his technique, Schleinstein serves as an inspiration to them. And so it is above all artists, photographers, filmmakers and musicians that come to play a role in Schleinstein’s life and allow him to operate as an artist amongst other artists. Bruno Schleinstein dies in Berlin in 2010.

A monograph of Bruno Schleinstein’s work, edited by Susanne Zander and Nicole Delmes, was published in early 2020, offering a view of his multifaceted artistic output.

Jetzt erhätlich: Der Ausstellungskatalog von "DREAM BABY DREAM" im Haus Mödrath

Morton Bartlett, ohne Titel, ca. 1950, vintage silver gelatin print, 13 x 10 cm

 

Der Ausstellungskatalog zur Ausstellung "Dream Baby Dream" im Haus Mödrath erschienen

Dort schreibt Kuratorin Gesine Borcherdt über Morton Bartlett:

"Wir treten hinaus auf den Flur. Zum Fenster hin hängen vier Zeichnungen und drei schwarzweiße Vintage-Fotografien. Sie alle zeigen Mädchen oder vielmehr: Puppen, von denen eine seltsam sexuelle Atmosphäre ausgeht. MORTON BARTLETT (1909 in Chicago - 1992 in Boston) hat sie nicht für die Augen der Öffentlichkeit gemacht: Die fünfzehn fast lebensgroßen Puppen - zwölf Mädchen und drei Jungen - formt er von 1936 bis 1963 aus Gips, detailgenau vom Fingernagel bis zum Geschlecht, kostümiert sie mit Perücken und selbstgenähten Kleidern und setzt sie für seine Fotografien lebensecht in Szene. (...)"

Für weitere Informationen und eine Leseprobe klicken sie hier.

FORREST BESS at the Fridericianum

Forrest Bess: Untitled (No. 5), 1949 © The artist and Collection Mickey Cartin

 

Forrest Bess at the Fridericianum
February 15, 2020 – September 6, 2020  

"Forrest Bess, born in 1911 in Bay City, Texas, where he also died in 1977, led an extremely secluded existence in the first half of the 1940s on the Gulf of Mexico, where alongside catching and selling fishing bait he dedicated himself to painting. During this time, Bess began to systematically encapsulate in painting “visions” that appeared to him on the threshold between wakefulness and sleep. For Bess, subconscious human experiences manifested themselves in these abstract and highly symbolic images. He pursed their exploration like a piece of obsessive research that he articulated in countless records and intensive correspondence without ever unravelling the mystery of his creativity.
The Fridericianum presents the first exhibition in Germany of the artist’s work for over three decades. The show allows visitors to rediscover this outstanding exponent of postwar art, who is as relevant for contemporary discourse as he is enigmatic."

For additional information about the exhibition please click here.

Exhibition "Kasten" at the Stadtgalerie Bern extended until July 11, 2020

Adelhyd van Bender, untitled, 1999-2014, 50 x 37 x 25 cm

 

Adelhyd van Bender on view at Stadtgalerie Bern 
as part of the exhibition "Kasten"

curated by Cédric Eisenring and Luca Beeler until July 11, 2020

"Folders and boxes serve as physical structures in Adelhyd van Bender’s work, whose cryptic systematization employs graphic and scientific means, repetition and variation. Against the backdrop of impending self-destruction during the Cold War, Adelhyd van Bender developed an obsessive fascination with atomic radiation that preoccupied him up to his death in 2014. Repeatedly appearing in his countless drawings are geometrical diagrams reminiscent of atomic models, orders of the universe or mystical models – like the Sefiroth of the Kabbalah. These also include missile-like structures, maps of alleged nuclear power plants in Germany, plans for the city of Moscow and radiation warning signs. The status of the contents inside the fourteen commercial and variously patterned storage boxes remains unclear. The A4 sheets, often copied multiple times and in some cases showing slight variances, are most likely original material the artist intended to work on further. The boxes also contain official documents – some of which also reappear in drawings – mail-order catalogs, magazines and other material."


The exhibition features among others:

Kaspar Müller, Phung-Tien Phan, Vaclav Pozarek, Marta Riniker-Radich, Julia Scher, Richard Sides, Davide Stucchi, Sergei Tcherepnin

"Ton, Steine, Beton" // FAZ-Artikel über die aktuelle Gruppenausstellung "Just Another Day"

Prophet Royal Robertson, untitled (Space Scene), ca. 1980s, 

Tinte und Marker auf Papier, 45,7 x 61cm

 

FAZ-Artikel über die aktuelle Gruppenausstellung "Just Another Day" erschienen!

"„Kein besonderer Tag“ – als durchaus besonders dürfen die Werke der Künstlerinnen und Künstler in dieser Gruppenschau gelten, allesamt Charaktere, die sich in eigenen gedanklichen Universen bewegten, exklusives Wissen über die Welt generierten und daraus exzeptionelle Kunst hervorgehen ließen: Zeichnungen, Stickereien, Polaroids, konzeptuelle Grafik, serielle Blätter, bisweilen in einer ausufernden Anzahl, die gegen unendlich tendiert. Es seien längst nicht mehr nur Connaisseure der Outsider-Art, die solche Werke kauften, so die Galeristin Susanne Zander, vielmehr kämen auch junge Sammler, die sich ganz einfach für zeitgenössische Kunst interessierten. 

Etwa für die symbolistischen Fotokopien mit Tabellen, Schautafeln, Mischtechniken des gelernten Elektrikers Harald Bender (1950 bis 2014), der, nachdem er arbeitslos wurde, in den siebziger Jahren an der Berliner Hochschule der Künste studierte. Dort wurde er, aus nicht bekannten Gründen, zwangsexmatrikuliert. Hirngespinste bemächtigten sich der Geisteswelt des jungen Mannes: Einen Uterus wähnte er in sich mitsamt einem sicherlich belastenden atomaren Geheimnis. Fortan taufte sich der Künstler Adelhyd van Bender. Mehrere hundert Aktenordner füllen in der Galerie die Regale mit dem Nachlass; was er in den Abertausenden Diagrammen – auf Geheiß höherer Mächte – akribisch und tabellarisch chiffriert, dürfte eine Wissenschaft für sich sein. Von bezwingendem Charme sind hingegen die farbigen Zeichnungen des Amerikaners „Prophet“ Royal Robertson: Als seine Ehefrau den gelernten Schildermaler aus Louisiana 1955 nebst gemeinsamen zwölf Kindern verließ, vermutete er im anderen Geschlecht eine Verschwörung gegen sich und wetterte in Bildern dagegen, die an Raymond Pettibon denken lassen. (...)"

Georg Imdahl 

Den vollständigen Artikel finden Sie hier.

Artikel über das neue Buch "Bruno Schleinstein"

Buchdeckel "Bruno Schleinstein", herausgegeben von Nicole Delmes und Susanne Zander, Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König

 

Artikel über Bruno Schleinstein von Gunnar Lützow erschienen!

"Bruno Schleinstein: Ein großer urbaner Unbequemer
Aufgewachsen in der Wittenauer Heilstätte und mitten in Berlin immer an den Rändern beheimatet, war der Musiker und Künstler Bruno Schleinstein eine Inspiration für Oscar-Gewinner Elliott Smith und spielte bei Werner Herzog Kaspar Hauser. Jetzt ist ein würdigendes Buch erschienen."

Gunnar Lützow   

Den vollständigen Artikel finden Sie hier.

"Bruno Schleinstein"
Mit Texten von Annett Krause & Bruno Schleinstein

Herausgegeben von Nicole Delmes und Susanne Zander 
Veröffentlicht im Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Köln
Erhältlich bei Delmes & Zander und in der Buchhandlung Walther König

 

Just Another Day / 2020

Horst Ademeit, untitled, 20.05.1998, polaroid edited, 11 x 9 cm

Just Another Day - Kein besonderer Tag

From May 5th, 2020

Just Another Day presents works by five artists whose practices all look closely at a world turned upside down. Observe, describe, document and record: it is in daily routine that the search for explanations and paths to change find their expression. Together, they depict the artistic possibilities for dealing with varying conceptions of the world.

We will be showing the works in our Lindenstrasse space from May 5, 2020. In addition to visiting the gallery, it is also possible to view the exhibition online via Skype or FaceTime by appointment.

Exhibited artists:

Horst Ademeit

Adelhyd van Bender

Helga Goetze

Prophet Royal Robertson

August Walla

Bruno Schleinstein / INDEPENDENT NEW YORK 2020

Bruno Schleinstein, untitled, undated, mixed media on paper, 30 x 42 cm,

 Bruno Schleinstein at Independent New York

March 6th - March 9th 2020

"What must the itinerant traveller think when he dreams he’s home again – and is awoken by a song from his own country only to see that he’s in a foreign land.” 
Bruno Schleinstein

Bruno Schleinstein is born in 1932 in Berlin, the youngest of three illegitimate children. Unable to cope with the responsibility of raising her young child, his mother gives him over to the custody of a children’s home when he is just three years old. He lives there for the following six years. As a so- called Reichsausschusskind (a designation for mentally and physically disabled children deemed “unworthy of life” under the NS euthanasia programme), he is transferred to the Wiesengrund educational facility at the Bonhoeffer Nerve Clinic in Berlin in 1941. Doctors employed at Wiesengrund are by this time already performing medical experiments on the children that often end in the latter’s deaths. There is no record of whether any such experiments were performed on Schleinstein himself. What is certain, however, is that he can describe the operations carried out on the children there in detail. 

Schleinstein remains locked up even after the war’s end. Following several unsuccessful escape attempts, he is transferred to a psychiatric hospital for children in 1947, justifed on the grounds of

his “obdurate tendency for escape.” In 1955, he fnally succeeds in escaping from the facility and travels to Baden-Baden. He returns to Berlin in 1963 and fnds a job at the Borsig-Werken, where he remains employed until his retirement. 

An advertising display board for the company Asbach Uralt featuring a Moritaten (street ballad) singer gives Schleinstein the idea of taking up the profession himself. From this point on he spends his weekends wandering the city’s rear courtyards, where he performs music with an accordion and glockenspiel. He also illustrates his songs with his own painted display boards. An employee of the Akademie der Künste becomes aware of Schleinstein and invites him to participate in a Moritaten festival being held there. Schleinstein makes his frst record, through which the flmmaker Lutz Eichholz becomes aware of the singer. This leads to his frst flm: 1966’s Bruno the Black. 

In 1973, Werner Herzog, who has just fnished writing the script for his flm The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser and is seeking to cast the lead role of Hauser himself, sees Eichholz’s flm during a screening by the German public broadcaster ARD. Herzog is fascinated by Schleinstein’s authentic and unaffected personality and contacts the artist, subsequently casting him in the lead role under the stage name Bruno S. The flm is screened as a German contribution to the 1975 Cannes Film Festival and is awarded the Grand Prix by the jury. In 1977, Bruno S. again plays the lead role in Herzog’s flm Stroszek – a role written especially for him by the director.

Bruno Schleinstein becomes a global star. Despite this, he continues to work as a forklift operator during the week and to spend his weekends playing music in courtyards. He draws and paints continuously. 

The frst exhibition of Schleinstein’s pictures takes place in a Berlin bar in 1983, with his frst gallery exhibition following a year later at endart gallery in the Berlin district of Kreuzberg. Delmes & Zander exhibits Schleinstein’s paintings and drawings from the late 1990s on. They are shown with great success at international art fairs and in both solo and group exhibitions. It is his fellow artists that are most fascinated with the authenticity and directness of his work, however. As an autodidact who taught himself to play music, to draw and to paint, and who always strove to perfect his technique, Schleinstein serves as an inspiration to them. And so it is above all artists, photographers, flmmakers and musicians that come to play a role in Schleinstein’s life and allow him to operate as an artist amongst other artists. Bruno Schleinstein dies in Berlin in 2010. 

A monograph of Bruno Schleinstein’s work, edited by Susanne Zander and Nicole Delmes, was published in early 2020, offering a view of his multifaceted artistic output.