Ariel Schlesinger
15 Mar - 26 Apr 2008
Ariel Schlesinger, C-Print from the "Minor Urban Disasters" series, 2007
Ariel Schlesinger, "Untitled" (Masking Tapes), 2003
Ariel Schlesinger, "Untitled" (Burned Turkmenistan Carpet I), 2008
Galerija Gregor Podnar is pleased to announce the opening of Ariel Schlesinger’s first solo exhibition in Berlin.
The art works of Berlin based Ariel Schlesinger create an intense contrast between the sharpness of materials that could be found in cheap consumption products, leftovers of construction sites or office supply on the one hand, and their gospel of creation to which they were intended on the other. This kind of contrast gives the material the quality of a magic trick, as literally depicted in L’angoisse de la page blanche (2007), where two white pages seemingly without any outside-force perpetually move toward each other while spinning around their axes. Yet at the same time, this procedure also works as an act of sabotage that paralyzes the functional value of the chosen objects. In the exhibition will also be shown other smaller sized sculptures giving an intrinsic insight into the wide range of Schlesinger’s working practice from 2002 until nowadays, who was born 1980 in Jerusalem.
Furthermore the core of the Ariel Schlesinger exhibition are two newly produced works Untitled (2008) from the limited Burned Turkmenistan Carpet series. The artist’s burning of antique and worn out oriental carpets relates to his personal experience:
“I recently happened to see a Caucasian carpet in one of the back rooms of the Pergamon Museum in Berlin that had been woven in the 16th century. Its huge dimensions and its vivid Bordeaux colors have struck me at first sight, only a few minutes later. At this moment, a second pattern revealed itself to me, a pattern which was much more powerful than the pattern woven into the carpet. The other pattern was formed by the scars, which had been inflicted on this carpet during a big fire in one of the storages of the museum in 1945 in the last days of the war. But since it had been rolled, the fire wasn’t able to destroy the inner layers of the carpet, which I was looking at right at this moment. It owes its present appearance to a very careful restoration work, which had been able to preserve the trauma. I was fascinated by the idea that on the one hand, an object had gone through a disaster but on the other hand, this disaster also created beauty.”
But all these approaches are just one side of the process. The other side consists in confronting the emptiness, which makes such an attempt into a revival of something dead.
The art works of Berlin based Ariel Schlesinger create an intense contrast between the sharpness of materials that could be found in cheap consumption products, leftovers of construction sites or office supply on the one hand, and their gospel of creation to which they were intended on the other. This kind of contrast gives the material the quality of a magic trick, as literally depicted in L’angoisse de la page blanche (2007), where two white pages seemingly without any outside-force perpetually move toward each other while spinning around their axes. Yet at the same time, this procedure also works as an act of sabotage that paralyzes the functional value of the chosen objects. In the exhibition will also be shown other smaller sized sculptures giving an intrinsic insight into the wide range of Schlesinger’s working practice from 2002 until nowadays, who was born 1980 in Jerusalem.
Furthermore the core of the Ariel Schlesinger exhibition are two newly produced works Untitled (2008) from the limited Burned Turkmenistan Carpet series. The artist’s burning of antique and worn out oriental carpets relates to his personal experience:
“I recently happened to see a Caucasian carpet in one of the back rooms of the Pergamon Museum in Berlin that had been woven in the 16th century. Its huge dimensions and its vivid Bordeaux colors have struck me at first sight, only a few minutes later. At this moment, a second pattern revealed itself to me, a pattern which was much more powerful than the pattern woven into the carpet. The other pattern was formed by the scars, which had been inflicted on this carpet during a big fire in one of the storages of the museum in 1945 in the last days of the war. But since it had been rolled, the fire wasn’t able to destroy the inner layers of the carpet, which I was looking at right at this moment. It owes its present appearance to a very careful restoration work, which had been able to preserve the trauma. I was fascinated by the idea that on the one hand, an object had gone through a disaster but on the other hand, this disaster also created beauty.”
But all these approaches are just one side of the process. The other side consists in confronting the emptiness, which makes such an attempt into a revival of something dead.