umstellen - Kunstverein Tiergarten, Berlin

Opening: 06. 12.2013

Duration: 06. 12.2013  -  11.0 1.2014

Participating artists: Pedro Boese, Monika Brandmeier, Claudia Kugler, Anja Schwörer, Michaela Zimmer

Introduction: Susanne Prinz

With umstellen, the Kunstverein Tiergarten is presenting works by five artists who have come together as part of a jointly developed exhibition concept. In painting, digital image processing and sculpture, they reflect on contemporary art's paradigmatic approach to questions about the interplay between truth and lies, between reality and illusion.

Since the early avant-gardes of the 20th century, a wide variety of artistic approaches have opened up in the move away from representationalism. Whether Constructivism, Suprematism, Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, OP Art or Radical Painting - over the past 100 years, a system of coordinates has emerged in which artistic reflections have been able to unfold beyond the depictive function. Freed from non-pictorial reference in this way, artists were now free to concentrate on processes of seeing and perceiving and to decipher these as culturally and historically characterised processes.

The focus of the exhibition is the ‘after’. What relevance do the central questions of non-objective art have in today's context and, above all, how can they be developed further, possibly broken open? With Pedro Boese, Monika Brandmeier, Claudia Kugler, Anja Schwörer and Michaela Zimmer, the exhibition presents five contemporary positions that pursue these questions in different ways. In the artistic works, the concepts of space and movement, surface and material, truth and perception continue to be at the centre of the analysis, although the artistic approaches go beyond exploring the possibilities of media and perceptual aesthetics:

Pedro Boese's painterly and graphic works are based on an exploration of a constructive visual vocabulary and the use of simultaneous contrasts of colour and form to reflect both processes of movement in perception and the materiality of images, while Monika Brandmeier's works focus on the analysis of space. With their industrially manufactured materials and their characteristic quality, Brandmeier's sculptural works develop imaginary spaces that are defined by the coexistence of both recognisable and enigmatic moments. In contrast, Claudia Kugler's digitally developed images open up spatial perspectives without allowing a concrete spatiality to become identifiable. Instead, her works lead the viewer back into a reflection of their own perceptive vision. Anja Schwörer takes a similar approach when she subjects the textile bases of her pictures to various editing and reworking processes in order to develop illusionistic pictorial spaces whose spatial perspectives are reinforced by rhythmic arrangements. Michaela Zimmer is a painter whose works deal with questions of pictorial spatiality as well as painterly surface. Her few structures, set on flat colour textures, are based on repeated sequences of action from performances that lend the overlapping layers something incidental.

Visitors to the exhibition are invited to engage with these new productive approaches within the broad framework of non-objectivity and to adjust their own visual and perceptual conventions to the complex pictorial realities of five fascinating contemporary positions.

Text: Susanne Prinz

Curator: Michaela Zimmer