Johannes Wohnseifer
08 Apr - 12 May 2011
JOHANNES WOHNSEIFER
Holes Filled With Time
8 April - 12 May,2011
This moment
That now has passed
Filled a hole with time
Almine Rech is pleased to present Holes Filled With Time, Johannes Wohnseiferʼs first solo exhibition at the gallery in Brussels. The exhibition will feature all new paintings, paperworks and photographs by the artist.
For this exhibition Johannes Wohnseifer examined the significance of time for his own artistic practice. Combining past, present and future to a stream of times Wohnseifer will present new large scale paintings which are based on a series of fragmented, abstract works entitled Cold War. Wohnseifer continues working with the topic of confrontations of power blocks and loose references to a certain perod of time.
In a second step he expands this theme to hybrid sequences which bring together comic drawings of the 1970s and colour schemes of the 1940s with South American graffiti.
Before there was the preview button on a digital camera, there were Polaroid cameras and film that made possible the thrill of taking a picture and seeing how it turned out right away. Now that magic is fading into history. Polaroid Corp. recently announced it will no longer manufacture the instant film with the iconic white borders. The Massachusetts-based company stopped producing Polaroid instant cameras last year and will close factories that produce its film in the United States, Mexico and the Netherlands this spring.Introduced in 1948, the Polaroid camera reached its height of popularity in the 1960s and 1970s with such models as the Swinger, the SX-70 and the One-Step.
The new series of Polaroid-Paintings refer to the instant effect in photography but at the same time to the end of production of Polaroid cameras. A painful experience for many artists who worked with this technique and used it extensively as medium. The white powdercoated aluminium frames with painted inserts serve as a break between the other paintings in the show and are meant to work as a frozen moment transforming photography into monochrome painting.
For another group of works Wohnseifer reproduces a series of collages he made out of vintage b/w-prints combined with images of Braun-alarmclocks 1996. In 1997 Wohnseifer produced a record with commissioned electronic music for which he used the sampled sounds of his collected Braun-alarmclocks. The groundbreaking industrial design by Braun can be found as a quote in many Apple-products today and is so transferred from the era of Cold War to the present.
We see each other in the future
Furthermore there are new plexiglass wallworks dealing with possible timespans in the future. These works have been produced to their specific site but speak of a most uncertain context.
Johannes Wohnseifer was born in Cologne 1967. He lives and works in Cologne and Erftstadt and will have a solo exhibition at the Simultanhalle, Cologne, in 2011.
Recent past solo exhibitions include: Casey Kaplan Gallery, New York 2011, Praz-Delavallade, Paris 2009, Johann König, Berlin 2009, Galleri K, Oslo 2009, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne 2008 and The Presentation House Gallery, Vancouver, BC, Canada in 2007. Wohnseifer is currently included in the exhibition, Compass in Hand: Selections from the Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection, organized by Christian Rattemeyer and Cornelia H. Butler, that first opened at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 2009, is now on view at Institut Valencià d’Art Modern (IVAM), Valencia, Spain, and travels to Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin in March 2011.
Holes Filled With Time
8 April - 12 May,2011
This moment
That now has passed
Filled a hole with time
Almine Rech is pleased to present Holes Filled With Time, Johannes Wohnseiferʼs first solo exhibition at the gallery in Brussels. The exhibition will feature all new paintings, paperworks and photographs by the artist.
For this exhibition Johannes Wohnseifer examined the significance of time for his own artistic practice. Combining past, present and future to a stream of times Wohnseifer will present new large scale paintings which are based on a series of fragmented, abstract works entitled Cold War. Wohnseifer continues working with the topic of confrontations of power blocks and loose references to a certain perod of time.
In a second step he expands this theme to hybrid sequences which bring together comic drawings of the 1970s and colour schemes of the 1940s with South American graffiti.
Before there was the preview button on a digital camera, there were Polaroid cameras and film that made possible the thrill of taking a picture and seeing how it turned out right away. Now that magic is fading into history. Polaroid Corp. recently announced it will no longer manufacture the instant film with the iconic white borders. The Massachusetts-based company stopped producing Polaroid instant cameras last year and will close factories that produce its film in the United States, Mexico and the Netherlands this spring.Introduced in 1948, the Polaroid camera reached its height of popularity in the 1960s and 1970s with such models as the Swinger, the SX-70 and the One-Step.
The new series of Polaroid-Paintings refer to the instant effect in photography but at the same time to the end of production of Polaroid cameras. A painful experience for many artists who worked with this technique and used it extensively as medium. The white powdercoated aluminium frames with painted inserts serve as a break between the other paintings in the show and are meant to work as a frozen moment transforming photography into monochrome painting.
For another group of works Wohnseifer reproduces a series of collages he made out of vintage b/w-prints combined with images of Braun-alarmclocks 1996. In 1997 Wohnseifer produced a record with commissioned electronic music for which he used the sampled sounds of his collected Braun-alarmclocks. The groundbreaking industrial design by Braun can be found as a quote in many Apple-products today and is so transferred from the era of Cold War to the present.
We see each other in the future
Furthermore there are new plexiglass wallworks dealing with possible timespans in the future. These works have been produced to their specific site but speak of a most uncertain context.
Johannes Wohnseifer was born in Cologne 1967. He lives and works in Cologne and Erftstadt and will have a solo exhibition at the Simultanhalle, Cologne, in 2011.
Recent past solo exhibitions include: Casey Kaplan Gallery, New York 2011, Praz-Delavallade, Paris 2009, Johann König, Berlin 2009, Galleri K, Oslo 2009, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne 2008 and The Presentation House Gallery, Vancouver, BC, Canada in 2007. Wohnseifer is currently included in the exhibition, Compass in Hand: Selections from the Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection, organized by Christian Rattemeyer and Cornelia H. Butler, that first opened at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 2009, is now on view at Institut Valencià d’Art Modern (IVAM), Valencia, Spain, and travels to Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin in March 2011.