Vogue Paris, October 2017, p. 184, untitled, 1970, courtesy Delmes & Zander
Vogue Paris got also caught by Margret's attraction.
In the October issue she finds a spot next to Romy Schneider and great painters like Paul Klee and Pablo Picasso. We will be delighted to introduce you to her.
FIAC 2017 - Grand Palais - Paris
Find us at booth 1.J18
"Since the second half of the 20th century, we have lived under the shadow of two clouds: the mushroom cloud of the atomic bomb, and the ‘cloud’ of distributed information networks. How did the central metaphor of cold war paranoia become the utopian metaphor of today? ‘Under the Clouds’ explores the contemporary sublime that has replaced the natural one, and the interrelated effects and affects of these two clouds on life and work, leisure and love, and on images, bodies, and minds.
The post-war technologies of the emergent third industrial revolution have now evolved to fit in the palm of our hand; we no longer merely look at images, we now touch, scroll, pinch, and drag them. Where is the border between the self and its data shadow, between information, matter, and affect? The biological, economic, aesthetic, and political effects of living under the clouds has taken the form of new relations between data and material, as well as increasing debt and abstract financialization; the changing nature of work and sex; and new relationships between screens, images, and things. As earlier forms of technologically inflected art sought to mitigate the effects of change — both on perception and society — many of today’s artistic practices confront the myriad interfaces and decentralized networks that continue to shape and transform daily life, forming new evolving connections between bits and atoms."
Adel Abdessemed, Horst Ademeit, Cory Arcangel, Arte Nucleare, Darren Bader, Enrico Baj, Robert Barry, Eduardo Batarda, Thomas Bayrle, Neïl Beloufa, René Bertholo, Joseph Beuys, K.P. Brehmer, Bruce Conner, Kate Cooper, Gregory Corso, Guy Debord, Harun Farocki, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Carla Filipe, General Idea, Melanie Gilligan, Jean-Luc Godard & Anne-Marie Miéville, Peter Halley, Rachel Harrison, Mona Hatoum, Pedro Henriques, Thomas Hirschhorn, Yves Klein, Sean Landers, Elad Lassry, Mark Lombardi, Julie Mehretu, Katja Novitskova, Ken Okiishi, Trevor Paglen, Nam June Paik, Silvestre Pestana, Pratchaya Phinthong, Seth Price, Martha Rosler, Thomas Ruff, Jacolby Satterwhite, Ângelo de Sousa, Frances Stark, Haim Steinbach, Hito Steyerl, Jean Tinguely, Adelhyd van Bender, Stan VanDerBeek, Andy Warhol, Christopher Williams, Christopher Wool, Anicka Yi
‘Under the Clouds’ was curated by João Ribas, Deputy Director and Senior Curator, Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art.
Careful Whispers
featuring Margret - Chronicle of an Affair and Anonymous Collages from the 19th Century
In the exhibition Careful Whispers Delmes & Zander will feature two positions which employ a distinctive artistic practice in order to bring to life a private fantasy carefully conceived in utmost secrecy: Margret – Chronicle of an Affair and Anonymous Collages from the 19th Century.
Margret – Chronicle of an Affair is a detailed account of a love story between the young German secretary Margret and her boss Günter also the meticulous bookkeeper of the affair. From May 1969 to December 1970 he took photographs of Margret dressing and undressing, applying make up or posing with a new outfit, but also wrote detailed protocols with his typewriter about the days and times of their secret rendezvous and kept souvenirs of their stays in hotels, casinos and cocktail bars.
Although she certainly was aware of the photographs, it is unlikely that Margret knew about Günter's personal notes which focused for example on the frequency and duration of their sexual encounters and on the regularity of her contraceptive pill intake. Nor is it likely that she knew about the collection of personal ephemera that Günter archived, such as the samples of Margret's head and pubic hair, her fingernail clippings or the tissue with dried blood from a scab on her wrist.
An anonymous album of photo collages, discovered in France and dating from around the 1860-70s, repeatedly shows women either tied at the stake before burning or on their knees awaiting the moment of decapitation. The album employs a number of groundbreaking techniques for the time that materialize the exact vision of its author: collage, hand colouring, photographic superimposition, double- and overexposure. The technical virtuosity of the works also suggests the hand of a professional photographer with access to photographic equipment and a darkroom, as well as to contact with his female models. The mise-en-scène is clearly influenced by popular motifs of the time such as Paul Delaroche’s paintings The Decapitation of Lady Jane Grey (1833) or Herodias with the Head of John the Baptist (1843).
Similarly to Margret – Chronicle of an Affair, it is unlikely that the models in the anonymous collages knew the extent to which they would feature in the works. Barely concealing a deep-rooted sexualized undercurrent, the works place the models in a completely new setting in which they are radically re-contextualized and reimagined. They become part of a new creation inspired by the exclusive fantasies of their authors. Although it is something that is not allowed and executed behind closed doors, their authors are compelled to do it and for this purpose they resort to artistic processes that are carefully developed and perfected over time to obtain the desired result. Both Margret and the models in the album are like paper dolls that can be secretly played with: Günter documents Margret in the new dress he bought for her in a similar way as does the author of the anonymous album when he glues a cut-out apron onto his models so that they look the way he needs them to look like. Within his fantasy, within what he believes is right, within what others might believe is wrong. It is a fantasy and therefore everything is allowed. It is the justification of his desire.
Alexandra Wach über unsere OKEY DOKEY Show in der aktuellen Ausgabe der MONOPOL (10/2017)
Die Realität wird überbewertet Eine Gruppenschau in der Galerie Delmes & Zander in Köln macht die Mystifizierung des Alltags spürbar.
"Mit dem 'Leichtmetallrad' von Yngve Holen kommt man nicht weit, denn es hat seine Form von Schneeflocken geliehen. Ist dies ein Fetisch einer unbekannten nordischen Kultur? Bei den Messgeräten, vollgekritzelten Kalendern und die Tage strukturierenden Polaroids, mit denen Horst Ademeit seine Angst vor Kältestrahlen zu bändigen versuchte, versagen dagegen alle Mutmaßungen darüber, was diesen Außenseiter-Konzeptkünstler in seinem Innersten umtrieb. Diese Objekte sind Zeugnisse des einsamen Abstiegs in eine subjektive Gegenwelt.
Wenn sich gleich drei Galerien zusammentun, um der "Mystifizierung des Alltags" nachzuspüren, ist das Ergebnis nicht zwangsläufig ein dreifacher Esoterik-Akkord. Im Rahmen der Kooperation "Okey Dokey" hatte die Galerie Delmes & Zander die Frankfurter Kollegen Neue Alte Brücke sowie die Pariser Galerie 1900–2000 nach Köln eingeladen. Das Ergebnis ist – trotz vieler verhuschter Papierformate – eine anregende Mischung aus surrealistischen Klassikern wie Hans Bellmer, dem Körperapokalyptiker Tetsumi Kudo oder der von ihren eigenen Händen faszinierten Eliza Douglas. Für all diese Künstler gilt: Die Realität wird überbewertet. Lasst uns einen Blick ins magische Abseits wagen. (...)
Image of wall drawing in Adelhyd van Benders apartment in Berlin.
Courtesy Delmes & Zander, Cologne
Sofia Leibly and Adelhyd van Bender
September 16–November 1, 2017 PAGE (NYC), 368 Broadway, #511, NY 10013
Opening: Saturday, September 16th, 6–8pm
"PAGE (NYC) presents a two-person exhibition by Sofia Leiby (US, b. 1989) and Adelhyd van Bender (Germany, 1950–2014). New readings of van Bender’s drawings are made possible in connection to Leiby’s work; her new paintings are inspired by research into the pursuit of aesthetic exactness, “success” and balance within mid-late twentieth-century German theories of perception and Gestalt. One section of a wall drawing from van Bender’s Berlin apartment is reproduced in the gallery for the first time.
When Sofia gave me the title of her silkscreen painting as PRÄGNANZ / Götz, Arnheim, Maitland-Graves (2017), she explained that “‘Prägnanz’ is a strange German word that basically means, ‘aesthetically successful and concise,’ and dates to the time period relevant to the tests." The tests are those devised in the 1970s by K. O. Götz (1914–2017) as an improvement on the discredited Maitland-Graves Design Judgement Test of thirty years prior. Tired of art criticism’s “idealistic” “word cascades,” Götz studied Gestalt and other fields of psychology and information theory in the interest of establishing an “exact aesthetics”—a new way to “objectively” measure visual abilities and evaluate expressive form. Participants in the resulting visual aesthetic sensitivity test (VAST) were asked to work their way through a book of fifty-two pairs of black abstract shapes that Götz had drafted and report, casting subjective preference aside, which of the two was more balanced. Although Götz asserted that his scientific and artistic interests were separate, in Leiby and van Bender’s work these parallel pursuits collide, and are brought into relation with features of lived experience that Götz had wanted to discount.(...)
As much as harmony in composition, balance in van Bender’s work appears as a refusal to choose either or. Repeatedly referring in notes and drawings to “Geschlecht” (gender), van Bender “seems to have identified as both male and female,” and strikes a balance in self-portraits as lady justice with scales. Further systems of categorisation and judgement appear to have been refused: a van Bender drawing in this exhibition suggests a system made up of false choices: “D. Tradition. D. D. Fashion. D. D. Opinion. D. D. Neurer [innovator]. D.” Is this an allusion to the art critic’s terms of recognition? Further works on paper carry the stamp of Universität der Künste Berlin (Berlin Arts Academy), the school that forced van Bender to exmatriculate in 1976. Reasons for exmatriculation from UdK today include failure to pay your fees or failure of the final examination. Poor performance or poor circumstance, or an interrelation of the two."
To read the complete essay written by Lizzie Homersham please click here:www.page-nyc.com
