EXTRAVAGANZA at Centro de Arte Olivia

Installation View © Dinis Santos

EXTRAVAGANZA

Curator: Antonia Gaeta

April 13, 2019 – September 15, 2019

Centro de Arte Oliva

The show EXTRAVAGANZA includes works by Agatha Wojciechowsky, Anna Zemánková, Aurel Iselstöger, Eugene Von Bruenchenhein, Margarethe Held, Derrick Alexis Coard and Karl Hans Janke among others from the Treger/Saint Silvestre Collection.

Read here Antonia Gaeta's text about the exhibition:

The rhetorical apprehension of a specific strangeness

In the chronicle Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, Jorge Luis Borges wrote about “a certain Chinese encyclopaedia” in which he catalogued species and different shapes in a random and subjective way. Every one of those shapes could assume a meaning or a substance created ad hoc for the situation that could basically be used for all things in the universe according to the level of interest and imagination of the readers. This apparent disorder or non-rigorous cataloguing made the coexistence of a great number of realities possible and found a place capable of welcoming objects and ideas.
In a simple exercise of comparison and analogy – conditio sine qua non for all sorts of intellectual production -, “that” Chinese encyclopaedia seemed to be the most suitable in order to explain the ideas that underlie and materialise in the exhibition Extravaganza.
A certain strangeness that is present in the artworks, the obsession with the obscene and nonsense, the refusal of logical rules, several etcetera (as Borges would say), the abstractions, the taste for the absurd, the chaos, the incongruence and all kinds of paradox, are assembled in an irreverent and discontinuous fashion, in an ingenious, ambiguous and redundant exhibition design, with several white walls.
A softly announced feeling of surprise surrounds the exhibition: the artworks don’t belong to the same genre or a specific geographical area, or even the same historical period. The artists are sometimes anonymous, unknown or working under pseudonyms. Almost illiterate, without artistic or literary training, they are, however, capable of bringing a great spiritual and creative emotion through drawings and portraits of never seen before landscapes, hard to catalogue physiognomies, the obsessive repetition mixed with autofiction and possibly the promise of another identity.

And here the artist’s biography helps contextualise and better understand – in case some find it necessary – the artworks: all of them, to a greater or lesser extent, had complex lives, irreparable losses, accidents, went through deprivations, were persecuted and cast aside, had multidimensional and extra-terrestrial experiences.
Through a creativity that is free from reason it is possible that they have found the access keys to the beyond and, perhaps, had the possibility to create other connections with body and mind. All these suppositions are possible, at least I like to think that.
However, what is favoured in Extravaganza is the pars destruens of the Treger/Saint Silvestre collection, in other words, the analysis of the relation between the idea of beauty and harmony that is done through a set of artworks whose common denominator is a non-linear speculative dynamic; an erratic or rapidly changing situation, unusual, bizarre. An extravagating that replaces ratio and norms with intuition and the visionary, that combines brilliance and revelry, dementia and insanity with contradictory and anomalous situations. (...)

For more Information and to see all Installation Views of the Exhibition visit: tsscollection.org

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MARCEL BASCOULARD / SPECIAL GUEST JÜRGEN KLAUKE

 Marcel Bascoulard, untitled, undated, Vintage Gelatin Silver Print,
12,8 x 8,8 cm, Courtesy Delmes & Zander, Cologne

MARCEL BASCOULARD / SPECIAL GUEST JÜRGEN KLAUKE

Delmes & Zander will show the photographic work of French artist Marcel Bascoulard. The photo series "Self Performance" (1972/73) by Jürgen Klauke, a seminal reference to the contemporary art scene, will be shown in the context of this exhibition.

Marcel Bascoulard is born in 1913 in France. He attends the art school of Bourges in the early 1930s. Parallel to his photographic work, he continues to paint and write throughout. He lives on the street at his own will, a self-determined clochard, until he is murdered in 1978 under unclear circumstances. He will remain a landmark of the city of Bourges until his death and is known to this day as “the man who dresses up in women’s clothes.”

His first self-portraits are taken in the early 40s. They show a young man in a dress, only subtly posing, brash yet sober, no makeup. He looks straight into the camera, unapologetically. This look, captured in his photographs as it progressively ages over the course of forty years, is the seemingly asexual invariable in a playful and elaborate interchange of dresses, some sewn by Bascoulard himself, others acquired in exchange for his paintings. It is these brief moments that transfer him into a different time and that enable him to take on a number of female identities: the unmarried young woman and the old spinster, the teacher and the shopkeeper (often holding a piece of broken mirror that resembles a hand-fan or a machete), the housekeeper with an apron and the lady of the house, but also roles that he invents or creates himself, such as the futuristic-looking geisha in vinyl from his later work. When arrested by the police in 1952, Bascoulard replies to the question of why he dresses in women's clothes in public: “It’s an artistic necessity.” Bascoulard's work derives essentially from this necessity: an artistic obsession at the heart of a carefully contrived life that raises questions about gender, identity, and biography.

Jürgen Klauke, Selfperformance, 13-teilig, 1972/73, Fotoarbeit auf Barytpapier, je 57 x 42 cm, Courtesy Delmes & Zander, Cologne Copyright VG Bild-Kunst

Jürgen Klauke (* 1943) begins to place his body at the center of his photographic work in the late 1960s and implements it as an immediate vehicle for expressing his artistic ideas. In doing so, he raises the question of gender-specific role assignment with provocative directness, ultimately reducing it ad absurdum. Beyond its formal serial character, the photographic work "Self Performance" (1972/73) also functions conceptually as a projection surface for multiple identities and genders, all of which Klauke constructs deliberately as part of his artistic thought and action. Beyond the mere appropriation of femininity, Klauke explores the concepts of self-presentability and transformability in order to explore new sexual typologies and to capture and objectify them within the medium of staged photography. This artificial and artistic rupture with traditional roles and standardized notions of identity in Klauke's pictorial worlds of the early 1970s form the core of a radical practice that is to this very day of seminal importance to an entire generation of young, performance-oriented artists.

"Jürgen Klauke is a unique figure in the art world. His inventions are nowadays taken for granted and have significantly influenced art over the last 30 years. He is a pioneer of multimedia and interdisciplinary artistic exploration, whose work fascinates and irritates in equal measure, oscillating between the poles of attraction and repulsion.”

Klaus Honnef on Jürgen Klauke, 2002

We would kindly like to thank Jürgen Klauke for his collaboration in this exhibition.

Also on our Website.

Installation view of SPEED 2 / James Richards, Leslie Thornton and more at Malmö Konsthall until May 26, 2019.

Installation Images of SPEED 2 at Malmö Konsthall. Photo: Helene Toresdotter, Courtesy Malmö Konsthall 

SPEED 2 / James Richards, Leslie Thornton and more at Malmö Konsthall. Curated by James Richards, Fatima Hellberg and Matt Fitts. In Collaboration with Künstlerhaus Stuttgart. With works by Adelhyd van Bender and Horst Ademeit. 

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HIPKISS Pit Land (Against Sea), curated by Monika Koencke Amorosa, until March 29 at Delmes & Zander

Installation view of the Hipkiss-show "Pit Land (Against Sea)", Delmes & Zander, Cologne
Photo: Johannes Post

SPEED 2 at Malmö Konsthall with works by Horst Ademeit and Adelhyd van Bender beside others

Image: Adelhyd van Bender, drawing from folder #52, 1999 -2014. © Delmes & Zander, Cologne.

SPEED 2
JAMES RICHARDS & LESLIE THORNTON
with works by Horst Ademeit, Tolia Astakhishvili, Adelhyd van Bender, Bruce Conner, Emily Feather, Terence McCormack, Vi Khi Nao, Thomas Zummer and Jens Thornton
16.03 – 26.05.2019, Malmö Konsthall

James Richards / Leslie Thornton, SPEED 2 opened on the 15th of March 2019 at Malmö Konsthall. This is the second iteration of the exhibition, following its first presentation at Künstlerhaus Stuttgart and takes the form of an expanded version, commissioned with Künstlerhaus and realised in dialogue with the spaces of Malmö Konsthall.

SPEED 2 comprises three major new commissions by James Richards and Leslie Thornton, alongside a show-within-the-show convened by Richards with works by Horst Ademeit, Tolia Astakhishvili, Adelhyd van Bender, Bruce Conner, Emily Feather, Terence McCormack, Vi Khi Nao, Jeff Preiss, Jens Thornton and Thomas Zummer.

In the making of SPEED 2, Richards and Thornton have been concerned with specific psychic and temporal states, rushes of interconnectedness and scientific wonder, as well as a sense of ecological dread and paranoia. The oscillation between an ordering impulse, and the relinquishing of control is a central feature of SPEED 2, one that returns in the exhibitions’ different modes: cinema screening, video mural, sound installation, study room and group show.

Many of the works in the group exhibition were made against a backdrop of apprehension and self-destruction during the Cold War, with its at times uncanny resonances with the present moment. The atmosphere contains an obsessive energy, a recurring fascination with rays, mind altering effects and rituals and the systematic sorting and recording of experience. It is sense of frantic repetition and labour, which van Bender described as ‘Divine Drudgery’, a spirit also present in Bruce Conner’s psychedelic inkblot drawings.

There is an impulse of collaboration that brought about SPEED 2, one shaped by the artists’ joint residency at CERN. This center for nuclear research became a working-site and a space for thinking artistically – the largest machine in the world, seeking the smallest particle, a combination between the epic and the mundane that recurs in the logic of SPEED 2. The exhibition comprises discrete and individual new works, from Richards’ large-scale video mural Phrasing and Thornton’s cinema installation Cut from Liquid to Snake, to the wall text and video installation Sheep Machine Redux, conceived for the spaces of Malmö Konsthall. It is a body of work developed from the artists’ individual practices but also from the third mind of collaboration, a channeling of and at times conscious unsettling of each other’s sensitivities. The basic biographical contrasts between Richards and Thornton are apparent: gender, age and sexuality are all points of difference. What has drawn them together is an inclination they seem to share: that of grabbing charged material, and without apparent judgement or moralising, filling and emptying it. There is an attuned pitch for locating and unsettling any received and comfortable meaning. And at the same time, they produce works with a highly specific sense of the contemporary moment and the urgencies that it presents.

Curated by Fatima Hellberg and James Richards with Matt Fitts

Commissioned by Malmö Konsthall and Künstlerhaus Stuttgart


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SPEED 2
James Richards / Leslie Thornton

Ausstellungseröffnung, Malmö Konsthall
Freitag, 15. März, 18–21 Uhr


James Richards / Leslie Thornton, SPEED 2 eröffnete am 15. März 2019 in der Malmö Konsthall. Es ist die zweite Version der Ausstellung nach ihrer Präsentation im Künstlerhaus Stuttgart. Dieser erweiterte zweite Teil wurde zusammen mit dem Künstlerhaus in Auftrag gegeben und im Dialog mit den Räumlichkeiten der Malmö Konsthall umgesetzt.

SPEED 2 besteht aus drei eigens für die Ausstellung produzierten Arbeiten von James Richards und Leslie Thornton, sowie einer von Richards zusammengestellten Ausstellung-in-der-Ausstellung mit Arbeiten von Horst Ademeit, Tolia Astakhishvili, Adelhyd van Bender, Bruce Conner, Emily Feather, Terence McCormack, Vi Khi Nao, Jeff Preiss, Jens Thornton und Thomas Zummer.

Im Entstehungsprozess um SPEED 2 beschäftigten sich Richards und Thornton mit einer Reihe psychischer und zeitlicher Zustände, einem rauschartigen Verbundensein und wissenschaftlichen Staunen sowie einem Gefühl ökologischer Verunsicherung. Das Oszillieren zwischen ordnendem Impuls und Kontrollaufgabe zieht sich als wiederkehrendes Merkmal durch die diversen Ausstellungsmodi von SPEED 2: Kinovorstellung, skulpturale Videowand, Soundinstallation, Lesesaal und Gruppenausstellung.

Viele der in der Gruppenausstellung vertretenen Werke entstanden vor der Kulisse dunkler Vorahnungen und drohender Selbstzerstörung in der Ära des Kalten Krieges, wobei sich nicht selten unheimliche Parallelen zur Gegenwart auftun. Die vorherrschende Atmosphäre birgt eine obsessive Energie, eine wiederkehrende Faszination für Strahlung, systematische Gliederung und Aufzeichnung von Erfahrungen sowie für bewusstseinsverändernde Effekte und Rituale. Dieses Gefühl fieberhafter Wiederholung und Arbeit, das van Bender als „göttliche Schinderei“ beschrieb, kommt auch in Bruce Conners psychedelischen Inkblot Drawings zum Ausdruck.

SPEED 2 entstand angeregt durch einen Impuls zur Kollaboration, der aus dem gemeinsamen Arbeitsaufenthalt der Künstler_innen am CERN hervorging. Das Zentrum für Nuklearforschung wurde zu einem Ort für das gemeinsame künstlerische Arbeiten und Denken – die größte Maschine der Welt, welche die kleinsten Teilchen erforscht, eine Kombination aus dem unbegreiflich Großen und dem Alltäglichen, die sich in der Logik von SPEED 2 wiederfinden lässt. Die Ausstellung enthält eigenständige Arbeiten, darunter Richards‘ großformatige Videowand Phrasing und Thorntons Kino-Installation Cut from Liquid to Snake, sowie die Wandtext- und Videoinstallation Sheep Machine Redux, welche speziell für die Räumlichkeiten der Malmö Konsthall konzipiert wurde. Alle Arbeiten sind aus den individuellen Praktiken der Künstler_innen und zugleich im Geiste der Zusammenarbeit entstanden – manchmal Bündelung, manchmal durchaus bewusste Störung der gegenseitigen Empfindungen. Die Biografien Richards‘ und Thorntons unterscheiden sich in so wesentlichen Punkten wie Geschlecht, Alter und Sexualität. Jedoch vereint sie die Neigung, sich aufgeladenes Material anzueignen und es ohne offenkundige Wertung oder Moralisierung zugleich aufzufüllen und zu entleeren. Sie sind aufeinander eingespielt, jegliche Form anerkannter, bequemer Bedeutungen aufzuspüren und zu erschüttern. Dabei produzieren sie Arbeiten mit einem höchst spezifischen Sinn für den gegenwärtigen Moment und die mit ihm verbundenen Dringlichkeiten.

Kuratiert von Fatima Hellberg und James Richards mit Matt Fitts

Im Auftrag von Malmö Konsthall und Künstlerhaus Stuttgart

Visit the website of Malmö Konsthall.

SPEED 2 /James Richards, Leslie Thornton and more at Malmö Kosthall

Image: Horst Ademeit, 551, 11.04.1992, inscribed polaroid (detail). Courtesy the Estate of Horst Ademeit / Delmes & Zander, Cologne.

 

SPEED 2 /James Richards, Leslie Thornton and more at Malmö Kosthall opening on the 15th of march. Curated by James Richards, Fatima Hellberg and Matt Fitts. In collaboration with Künstlerhaus Stuttgart.

 

(...) This second iteration which follows the exhibition at Künstlerhaus, comprises four new commissions: James Richards' video mural 'Phrasing'; Leslie Thornton's cinema installation, 'Cut from Liquid to Snake', alongside the jointly developed multi-channel sound piece 'Pocket call' and the wall text and video installation 'Sheep Machine Redux', conceived for the spaces of Malmö Konsthall. These elements are presented around a display of works by Horst Ademeit, Tolia Astakhishvili, Adelhyd van Bender, Bruce Conner, Emily Feather, Terence McCormack, Vi Khi Nao, Jens Thornton and Thomas Zummer, alongside a new presentation of Richards and Thornton's first collaborative piece 'Crossing' (2016). SPEED 2 is realised in collaboration between Künstlerhaus Stuttgart and Malmö Konsthall.

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Visit the website of Malmö Konsthall.

No Love Without Pain - Albrecht Becker at the Independent New York

Images: Installation view of "No Love Without Pain", Independent New York, 2019

 

NO LOVE WITHOUT PAIN Albrecht Becker 

Independent New York

March 7 - 10, 2019

It Is Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse, But the Society in Which He Lives. (Rosa von Praunheim, 1971)

In the fall of 1935, Albrecht Becker (1906-2002) is arrested and imprisoned for three years by the Nazis for violating Paragraph 175, the penal code that outlawed homosexuality in Germany until 1994. Five years later he signs up for the military service and is transferred to the Russian front. Here he begins to tattoo his own body and discovers the pleasures of pain. After the war Becker is introduced into the German flm industry, where he becomes one of the most prominent set designers and flm architects of the late 1950s to 1980s, working on over a hundred flm productions, some of which awarded with prestigious flm prizes.

Albrecht Becker begins his photographic self-portrayal in the early 1930s and continues to explore his body and his sexuality without apologies in an increasingly self-determined way for decades to
come. Hundreds of photographs taken over a period of forty years show an equivocal mise-en scène in which Becker engages in role play on multiple levels: He stages performative scenes and presents his body as a sculpture or uses it as a canvas, which he paints on, adorns and dresses up. He places himself in carefully composed flm sets and becomes the lead character, director, screenwriter and cameraman all at once. Permeated with a wry and witty theatricality, his self-portraits tell stories of seemingly irreconcilable versions of himself, an interplay between the sophisticated, dapper gentleman and the sexually empowered individual.

The photographic documentation is accentuated by the technical processes of post-production manipulation: Becker takes control of his physical transformations, and modifes his body through the very manipulation of the image by applying experimental techniques such as photographic duplication, multiple-exposure, mirror refection, collage and reworking the material. In a clever game of deception arising from different layers of medial-representation, his photomontages recall the work of Pierre Molinier in the way that they play with viewer's sense of orientation. Capturing simultaneity in one static image, his photomontages render the impression of movement as seen in Eadweard Muybridge's early photographic studies in motion.

A pioneer of body modifcation, Becker's work situates his body as a site for mutable and constant transformation: good or bad, accidental or intentional, he carries the results of his physical explorations with a grandeur bordering tongue-in-cheek exaggeration evocative of an attitude familiar from such contemporaries as Genesis P-Orridge. The continuity of his self-refection renders a complex, almost cinematic study that records the changes from middle- to old-age life and body. In this, it lucidly addresses the themes of time, mortality, sexuality and fetishism that are at the core of Becker's oeuvre. But his work is also an appeal to tolerance, to letting one be, thus gaining new signifcance in our times of rising radicalization and intolerance, in a growing climate of fear in Europe and beyond.

Becker has been the topic of several flms and his testimony as a gay man in Germany of the 1930s- 40s is featured in Rosa von Praunheim's documentary flm Love and Torment - Albrecht Becker (2005), in Hervé Joseph Lebrun’s Albrecht Becker, Arsch Ficker Faust Ficker (2004), as well as in Epstein and Friedmann's Paragraph 175 (2000). An interview with Becker is included in the visual history archive of the Shoah Foundation, an organization founded by Steven Spielberg for the remembrance of the Holocaust. James Richards’ video contribution to the 57th Venice Biennale (What Weakens The Flesh is The Flesh Itself, 2017) takes as a point of departure the photographic archive of Albrecht Becker. The exhibiton is made possible by the kind support of the Collection Hervé Joseph Lebrun.