IN THE LIGHT OF / SCHALTER, BERLIN 2008
In the Light ofAlexander Bühler in collaboration with Schalter
Opening: Friday, 15th February, 2008, 7 p.m.
16th February - 15th March, 2008
Thu, Fri, Sat, 3-7 p.m.
Schalter is pleased to announce "In the light of." The exhibition will present a collaborative installation between by Berlin-based, Swiss artist Alexander Bühler and Schalter. "In the light of" was created specifically for this context and is the product of a series of conversations between the artist and Schalter.
The role of the viewer within art has been subject to much scrutiny. Much of the writing surrounding the viewer has seen him or her as an activating agent who completes the work, and celebrated liberation from authorial intention. Less attention has been paid to the implied frailty and vulnerability of the artwork in search for the resonance within an audience.
As its multivalent title suggests, "In the light of" takes this notion of relationship as its starting point and foreground. Quite literally, to see something "in light of" something else, asks us to understand the one as dependent on the other. Recast here within the gallery walls, a series of disparate elements have been brought into a tense, if not sharp relief activated by the viewer through the use of a floodlight and a motion detector.
Alexander Bühler's work often employs the accidental and failure as central to its conception, where the arrival of impasse is seen as a prompt to discourse and as a spur to new work. Working with various media, Bühler recent pieces have dealt with the transformation of everyday materials into a new dialog, questioning our relationship with them. Primarily a painter, his images are grounded on abstracts of architecture, nature and various collected sources, such as found and photographed objects. His work has been shown extensively in the United Kingdom and Germany. Swiss born Buhler received his degree from the Chelsea College of Art in London in 2003. He has been living in Berlin since 2005.
Schalter is a non-commercial platform for the conception of art and exhibition making. The space was founded on a belief that the exhibition can also exist as artwork, and seeks to question traditional divisions between artist and curator, exhibition and discrete individual artwork, and how we understand context, meaning and author. The space was founded in October 2006, by Ryan Weber.