Felix Gmelin
19 Feb - 26 Mar 2011
FELIX GMELIN
Manifesto, De Antivader
19 February – 26 March 2011
Annet Gelink Gallery proudly presents the first solo exhibition of Felix Gmelin (Heidelberg, 1962) in the Netherlands.
Manifesto, de antivader, joins three installations in which Gmelin draws from his father’s personal archives. In his paintings and installations Gmelin tries to interpret and to restructure historical cultural sources. On a more personal level he tries to breathe new life into his father’s unfinished work.
Since the sixties, Otto Gmelin was a media-theoretician and filmmaker and taught at the Deutsche Film- und FernsehAkademie in Berlin and later at the University of Marburg. He participated actively in the 1968 left-oriented student revolutions in Berlin. A lot of his film material bears witness to his revolutionary views which Felix Gmelin interprets in his installations within both the context of the sixties’ activism and of his own contemporary work.
The installation Faster, Further. An attempt to finish my father’s iconography of the hat (2010-’11) consists of a video and a large group of paintings, drawings and photos. The video material dates back to the eighties and originates from Otto Gmelin’s estate, and concerns a short film about the history of the hat. The experimental film becomes critical when hats are piled on the model’s head faster and faster whereas the voice-over is talking about quickly changing modern fashion. The picturesque shots seem to refer to the historical art of painting. By having them return in his new paintings Gmelin returns the video images to the medium that originally inspired his father.
Also for his installation An attempt to finish my father’s feminist Edourard Manet (2010) Gmelin combined his paintings with video material of his father, in which he either acts himself or had his students sit. These fragments as well as the ones in his video installation Manifesto (2010) emphasize Otto Gmelin's anti-authoritarian views and his belief in revolution as a method to change the world. “Placing things we are familiar with in a new context changes our viewpoint and can change our view on society”, said Thomas Giefer, a former student of Otto Gmelin. By putting his father’s intellectual inheritance in a new context Gmelin initiates a new interpretation of the intellectual legacy of both his father and of the activist generation of the sixties of which he formed part.
Felix Gmelin lives and works in Berlin. He had solo exhibitions in amongst others Roda Sten in Goteborg, Portikus in Frankfurt, the Malmö Konstmuseum in Sweden and Gasworks in London, and he participated in group exhibitions amongst others at Moderna Museet in Stockholm (2010), the Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen (2008-’09), ‘Niet Normaal’ in the Beurs van Berlage in Amsterdam (2008), SMAK in Gent (2008) en in 2007 and 2003 he participated in the Venice Biennial and in 2006 in the Berlin Biennial.
Manifesto, De Antivader
19 February – 26 March 2011
Annet Gelink Gallery proudly presents the first solo exhibition of Felix Gmelin (Heidelberg, 1962) in the Netherlands.
Manifesto, de antivader, joins three installations in which Gmelin draws from his father’s personal archives. In his paintings and installations Gmelin tries to interpret and to restructure historical cultural sources. On a more personal level he tries to breathe new life into his father’s unfinished work.
Since the sixties, Otto Gmelin was a media-theoretician and filmmaker and taught at the Deutsche Film- und FernsehAkademie in Berlin and later at the University of Marburg. He participated actively in the 1968 left-oriented student revolutions in Berlin. A lot of his film material bears witness to his revolutionary views which Felix Gmelin interprets in his installations within both the context of the sixties’ activism and of his own contemporary work.
The installation Faster, Further. An attempt to finish my father’s iconography of the hat (2010-’11) consists of a video and a large group of paintings, drawings and photos. The video material dates back to the eighties and originates from Otto Gmelin’s estate, and concerns a short film about the history of the hat. The experimental film becomes critical when hats are piled on the model’s head faster and faster whereas the voice-over is talking about quickly changing modern fashion. The picturesque shots seem to refer to the historical art of painting. By having them return in his new paintings Gmelin returns the video images to the medium that originally inspired his father.
Also for his installation An attempt to finish my father’s feminist Edourard Manet (2010) Gmelin combined his paintings with video material of his father, in which he either acts himself or had his students sit. These fragments as well as the ones in his video installation Manifesto (2010) emphasize Otto Gmelin's anti-authoritarian views and his belief in revolution as a method to change the world. “Placing things we are familiar with in a new context changes our viewpoint and can change our view on society”, said Thomas Giefer, a former student of Otto Gmelin. By putting his father’s intellectual inheritance in a new context Gmelin initiates a new interpretation of the intellectual legacy of both his father and of the activist generation of the sixties of which he formed part.
Felix Gmelin lives and works in Berlin. He had solo exhibitions in amongst others Roda Sten in Goteborg, Portikus in Frankfurt, the Malmö Konstmuseum in Sweden and Gasworks in London, and he participated in group exhibitions amongst others at Moderna Museet in Stockholm (2010), the Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen (2008-’09), ‘Niet Normaal’ in the Beurs van Berlage in Amsterdam (2008), SMAK in Gent (2008) en in 2007 and 2003 he participated in the Venice Biennial and in 2006 in the Berlin Biennial.