Gina lee Felber | Jürgen Klauke
Sculptures | Photographs
17 Nov 2024 - 22 Feb 2025
Galerie Guido W. Baudach is pleased to present an exhibition of works by Gina Lee Felber and Jürgen Klauke. Klauke (*1943) counts among the widely known artists in Germany. Felber (*1957) and her practice are primarily familiar among connoisseurs. Both live together in Cologne. The exhibition displays a group of Felber's sculptural objects from the years 1994 to 2014, flanked by individual photographic works from Klauke's Prosecuritas cycle, which the artist worked on between 1987 and 1994. The juxtaposition reveals a certain kinship between the two series of works, which are so different in their media and are being exhibited together for the first time. It is expressed in an appearance that evokes associations with science fiction cinema. While Felber's sculptures could serve as templates for the set design of a film adaptation of a novel by Frank Herbert or Philip K. Dick, Klauke's photographs would easily pass as corresponding film stills.
In fact, the Prosecuritas series occupies a special position in Jürgen Klauke's extensive oeuvre. As a co-founder of >Body Art< and a pioneer of staged concept photography, Klauke early on already turned his body into an “agent for profound questions of identity politics” (Peter Weibel), developing >Gender Games< and other medial experiments to question common social norms beginning in the early 1970s, which have subsequently inspired the art discourse. The distinctiveness of Prosecuritas in this respect lies in the fact that, in a departure from his usual working method, Klauke did not capture an action staged by and with him directly with the camera, but photographed it from the screen of a luggage scanner at the airport, for which he pushed various objects, including his own body, into the baggage chute and had them x-rayed. By interposing an additional level, the monitor of the luggage scanner, Klauke increases the distance to his photographic subject on the one hand. On the other hand, it brings him close to the basic theme of his artistic practice in a different way: the >Conditio Humana<, the being-human in its various forms and requirements, especially in a social context.
The photographs in the Prosecuritas cycle, in which the supposedly objective images taken by the X-ray machine of the artist's inner life and the other objects he placed in the baggage chute are processed, have a metaphysical dimension. Klauke uses the apparatus, which actually serves security purposes, with a decidedly artistic intention. In doing so, he not only reduces its originally intended purpose to absurdity, he creates a new, innovative visual world, a completely unique form of visualizing the invisible. With Prosecuritas, Klauke creates images of a phantasmagorical character; as if from a dream, unreal and haunting at the same time. The consistently monochrome works are sometimes reminiscent of a shadow play. At times they allow for a bright lightness, only to drift into darker realms when the opportunity arises. With regard to his practice, Klauke himself remarks: “I search for new pictorial motifs in experimentation and play that deal with the return of the ever-same and slight deviations from it. My aim is to experience oneself and the world again and again in a new and different way, a thoughtful action by means of poetry, which always includes breaking up traditional ideas.”
In an essay on the works of Gina Lee Felber, curator and art theorist Stephan Berg points out that one of the productive paradoxes of artistic practice is that every work of art that has something to say to us necessarily contains a certain amount of the unsayable. This of course does not mean that art only begins where language ends. Berg rather alludes to the fact that what a work is able to tell us in the mediating exchange through observation is by no means completely gasped by the sayable. Instead, there is always a residue that wants to be discovered, experienced, reflected and comprehended differently. It is primarily this residue that Gina Lee Felber is concerned with in her works, regardless of the medium in which she, as an artist with a background in painting but active in a variety of ways, is currently working.
This is also evident in her sculptures exhibited here, mostly mounted on uniformly designed table bases, in which, unlike in Klauke's Prosecuritas works, the human figure does not appear. It is a different, deserted world that we encounter in Felber's objects. While on the outside they resemble peep-boxes, in their clearly visible interior they combine strings, wires, plaster, wax, silicone, paper, wood, found objects and glass to form strange, organic-looking constructs. These appear as delicate and poetic as they are rugged and bizarre, equally microcosmic and macrocosmic, like interior views of artificial life perhaps, or technical devices, or even modelled exterior views of machine aggregates or large-scale architecture, like somehow alien but also oddly familiar structures (Stephan Berg), vaguely reminiscent of scientific laboratory equipment, which feign functional meaningfulness, only to ultimately merge completely into the freedom of the absurd.
Felber's shrine-like assemblages refuse to be grasped according to purely rational-logical parameters. They are enigmatic, melancholic and, in the best sense of the word, strange. At the same time, they seem placeless and timeless, as if they originate from a future past somewhere in the middle of nowhere. Even the titles provide hardly any further clues as to their meaning, as they only list some of the materials used in their production. In an effort to find orientation in comparison, one may be reminded of Joseph Beuys and his showcase works, but also of the latex sculptures by Eva Hesse or the Technological Reliquaries by Paul Thek as well as - fundamentally - the art of Arte Povera and, as in Klauke's Prosecuritas, Surrealism in a broader sense. Here, as there, it is about the artistic transformation of reality; in part explicitly by and about the material and always addressed to the viewer's perception. Similar to Jürgen Klauke in Prosecuritas, Gina Lee Felber's sculptures also succeed in creating spaces of thought in which the possibilities of association are deliberately kept open.
The scenes in which Felber and Klauke allow us to participate through the means of sculpture and staged photography appear icy, frozen. They refer almost playfully to the cathartic motif of the >Memento Mori<. At the same time, both series of works confront us, at least indirectly, with our being-thrown-into-the-world. In the course of this, they put up for negotiation elementary experiences of the individual's existence in the digital industrial age such as loneliness, powerlessness and alienation as well as social mechanisms of exclusion, control and manipulation. Felber and Klauke's image and object worlds shake up the familiar, the usual, the conformist. They shift things in the direction of an openness which is explicitly indeterminate and in no way oriented toward establishing a new order. Especially in today’s day and age, there is something almost existentially necessary about them.
In fact, the Prosecuritas series occupies a special position in Jürgen Klauke's extensive oeuvre. As a co-founder of >Body Art< and a pioneer of staged concept photography, Klauke early on already turned his body into an “agent for profound questions of identity politics” (Peter Weibel), developing >Gender Games< and other medial experiments to question common social norms beginning in the early 1970s, which have subsequently inspired the art discourse. The distinctiveness of Prosecuritas in this respect lies in the fact that, in a departure from his usual working method, Klauke did not capture an action staged by and with him directly with the camera, but photographed it from the screen of a luggage scanner at the airport, for which he pushed various objects, including his own body, into the baggage chute and had them x-rayed. By interposing an additional level, the monitor of the luggage scanner, Klauke increases the distance to his photographic subject on the one hand. On the other hand, it brings him close to the basic theme of his artistic practice in a different way: the >Conditio Humana<, the being-human in its various forms and requirements, especially in a social context.
The photographs in the Prosecuritas cycle, in which the supposedly objective images taken by the X-ray machine of the artist's inner life and the other objects he placed in the baggage chute are processed, have a metaphysical dimension. Klauke uses the apparatus, which actually serves security purposes, with a decidedly artistic intention. In doing so, he not only reduces its originally intended purpose to absurdity, he creates a new, innovative visual world, a completely unique form of visualizing the invisible. With Prosecuritas, Klauke creates images of a phantasmagorical character; as if from a dream, unreal and haunting at the same time. The consistently monochrome works are sometimes reminiscent of a shadow play. At times they allow for a bright lightness, only to drift into darker realms when the opportunity arises. With regard to his practice, Klauke himself remarks: “I search for new pictorial motifs in experimentation and play that deal with the return of the ever-same and slight deviations from it. My aim is to experience oneself and the world again and again in a new and different way, a thoughtful action by means of poetry, which always includes breaking up traditional ideas.”
In an essay on the works of Gina Lee Felber, curator and art theorist Stephan Berg points out that one of the productive paradoxes of artistic practice is that every work of art that has something to say to us necessarily contains a certain amount of the unsayable. This of course does not mean that art only begins where language ends. Berg rather alludes to the fact that what a work is able to tell us in the mediating exchange through observation is by no means completely gasped by the sayable. Instead, there is always a residue that wants to be discovered, experienced, reflected and comprehended differently. It is primarily this residue that Gina Lee Felber is concerned with in her works, regardless of the medium in which she, as an artist with a background in painting but active in a variety of ways, is currently working.
This is also evident in her sculptures exhibited here, mostly mounted on uniformly designed table bases, in which, unlike in Klauke's Prosecuritas works, the human figure does not appear. It is a different, deserted world that we encounter in Felber's objects. While on the outside they resemble peep-boxes, in their clearly visible interior they combine strings, wires, plaster, wax, silicone, paper, wood, found objects and glass to form strange, organic-looking constructs. These appear as delicate and poetic as they are rugged and bizarre, equally microcosmic and macrocosmic, like interior views of artificial life perhaps, or technical devices, or even modelled exterior views of machine aggregates or large-scale architecture, like somehow alien but also oddly familiar structures (Stephan Berg), vaguely reminiscent of scientific laboratory equipment, which feign functional meaningfulness, only to ultimately merge completely into the freedom of the absurd.
Felber's shrine-like assemblages refuse to be grasped according to purely rational-logical parameters. They are enigmatic, melancholic and, in the best sense of the word, strange. At the same time, they seem placeless and timeless, as if they originate from a future past somewhere in the middle of nowhere. Even the titles provide hardly any further clues as to their meaning, as they only list some of the materials used in their production. In an effort to find orientation in comparison, one may be reminded of Joseph Beuys and his showcase works, but also of the latex sculptures by Eva Hesse or the Technological Reliquaries by Paul Thek as well as - fundamentally - the art of Arte Povera and, as in Klauke's Prosecuritas, Surrealism in a broader sense. Here, as there, it is about the artistic transformation of reality; in part explicitly by and about the material and always addressed to the viewer's perception. Similar to Jürgen Klauke in Prosecuritas, Gina Lee Felber's sculptures also succeed in creating spaces of thought in which the possibilities of association are deliberately kept open.
The scenes in which Felber and Klauke allow us to participate through the means of sculpture and staged photography appear icy, frozen. They refer almost playfully to the cathartic motif of the >Memento Mori<. At the same time, both series of works confront us, at least indirectly, with our being-thrown-into-the-world. In the course of this, they put up for negotiation elementary experiences of the individual's existence in the digital industrial age such as loneliness, powerlessness and alienation as well as social mechanisms of exclusion, control and manipulation. Felber and Klauke's image and object worlds shake up the familiar, the usual, the conformist. They shift things in the direction of an openness which is explicitly indeterminate and in no way oriented toward establishing a new order. Especially in today’s day and age, there is something almost existentially necessary about them.