Jürgen Klauke - Ziemlich - Tageszeichnungen 1979/81
06 Jun - 13 Jul 2013
Galerie Guido W. Baudach is pleased to present its second solo exhibition of work by Jürgen Klauke.
The exhibition comprises selected sheets from a series of drawings, Ziemlich (Quite), produced between 1979 and 1981. This series is part of a group of works, the Diary Drawings, which Klauke started to make after he began working as an artist in 1969. The drawings are a visual and written record, both of the first, fundamental decade of his creative output and of the 1970s in general, as seen from the personal perspective of an artist living in Cologne. Of the ten series that make up the Diary Drawings (they were originally bound), Ziemlich is the last. At the same time, Ziemlich marks a transition in Klauke’s artistic practice that took place at the beginning of the 1980s, namely from the spontaneity and directness of his early work to the evidently more subliminal treatment of the problem of existence in the face of corporeality.
Although the exhibited drawings from the diary series Ziemlich seldom seem to deal with concrete current affairs directly, “as the expression of emotional affinities on another level” they nevertheless represent “an authentic echo of the day, of the night,” as Ulli Seegers so aptly puts it. “They are momentary glimpses of states of mind that oscillate between euphoria and depression, between love and loneliness, strength and decrepitude. They embed a highly subjective emotional state in a universal existential horizon. The subject matter of the drawings is always corporeality; the body in relation to other bodies, in an imagined state of dissolution, as a source of unfettered energy and as a fundament of inert matter. There are silhouettes of figures, of heads and individual body parts, fantastic mutations and organic metamorphoses, hearts and triangles, phallic and vaginal orifices, convulsions of the brain, skeletons in cross sections and longitudinal sections – the body is examined right down to the central nervous system and dissected into its constituent elements. It appears in various physical conditions: Klauke depicts it flaming, fraying, whirling around, as a transparent membrane, splayed out in tension, in porous dissolution, but also as being monolithically solid, planar and impenetrable. He abolishes the bounds between materiality and dematerialisation, gravitation and levitation. The body becomes a silhouette-like matrix of inner emotional worlds which transform the static definitions of interior and exterior into a fundamentally dynamic relationship. The insularity of the individual appears as a fleeting phantasmagoria which immediately loses itself in the ornament of the unmotivated, indefinite outline. Even the planes are no longer defined by clearly delineated systems. They lead their own existence. Apparently arbitrary intersections, superimpositions and inversions of black and white counteract the idea of fixed entities; they are geared more toward alienating concealment than aiding perspectivally conditioned comprehension. But the formal dissolution of the subject matter – i.e. the body – by the elements that constitute the image – i.e. line and plane – is not to be taken as an abstraction of content; on the contrary, it stands in the context of an internally heightened hyperrealism: Klauke records a diaristic ‘illustration’ of the states of his experience of reality and wrests from the tide of time an inner moment of lived life for pictorial visualisation.
“In this way, text and image in Klauke’s diary facilitate two completely different approaches to contemporary events. Whilst the short fragments of sentences, generally placed at the upper edge of the image, draw upon external circumstances (who said / did what, how and why with / to whom?), the drawings refer to his own mental and emotional condition. The textual documentation and / or commentary of / on spent time is supplemented with an image of inner youth, of time experienced. The diary system developed by Klauke over ten years traces not only two parallel, adjacent expressive media, but also two levels of experience: a linguistic register of external reality is juxtaposed with a drawn register of its internal counterpart. The aim is not competition or interchangeability between these genres, but an approach to the complexity of the experience of reality. The multifariousness of what tends to be called reality is confirmed in the very disparity between text and image, that dialogue which can sometimes be so incomprehensible to outsiders, and given the temporal distance, probably even to Klauke himself. Written formulations are a response to the echoes of the world, to novelty, agitation or meaninglessness in the artist’s everyday life; the drawings locate the self. In this way, Klauke’s diary catches details that would be consigned to oblivion without the notes as well as moments of reflexive existential experience, branded into the memory as essential events. Predetermined Gregorian time and subjectively appropriated time, finitude and timelessness, are melded into a peculiar conglomerate of triviality and condition humaine.”
The exhibition comprises selected sheets from a series of drawings, Ziemlich (Quite), produced between 1979 and 1981. This series is part of a group of works, the Diary Drawings, which Klauke started to make after he began working as an artist in 1969. The drawings are a visual and written record, both of the first, fundamental decade of his creative output and of the 1970s in general, as seen from the personal perspective of an artist living in Cologne. Of the ten series that make up the Diary Drawings (they were originally bound), Ziemlich is the last. At the same time, Ziemlich marks a transition in Klauke’s artistic practice that took place at the beginning of the 1980s, namely from the spontaneity and directness of his early work to the evidently more subliminal treatment of the problem of existence in the face of corporeality.
Although the exhibited drawings from the diary series Ziemlich seldom seem to deal with concrete current affairs directly, “as the expression of emotional affinities on another level” they nevertheless represent “an authentic echo of the day, of the night,” as Ulli Seegers so aptly puts it. “They are momentary glimpses of states of mind that oscillate between euphoria and depression, between love and loneliness, strength and decrepitude. They embed a highly subjective emotional state in a universal existential horizon. The subject matter of the drawings is always corporeality; the body in relation to other bodies, in an imagined state of dissolution, as a source of unfettered energy and as a fundament of inert matter. There are silhouettes of figures, of heads and individual body parts, fantastic mutations and organic metamorphoses, hearts and triangles, phallic and vaginal orifices, convulsions of the brain, skeletons in cross sections and longitudinal sections – the body is examined right down to the central nervous system and dissected into its constituent elements. It appears in various physical conditions: Klauke depicts it flaming, fraying, whirling around, as a transparent membrane, splayed out in tension, in porous dissolution, but also as being monolithically solid, planar and impenetrable. He abolishes the bounds between materiality and dematerialisation, gravitation and levitation. The body becomes a silhouette-like matrix of inner emotional worlds which transform the static definitions of interior and exterior into a fundamentally dynamic relationship. The insularity of the individual appears as a fleeting phantasmagoria which immediately loses itself in the ornament of the unmotivated, indefinite outline. Even the planes are no longer defined by clearly delineated systems. They lead their own existence. Apparently arbitrary intersections, superimpositions and inversions of black and white counteract the idea of fixed entities; they are geared more toward alienating concealment than aiding perspectivally conditioned comprehension. But the formal dissolution of the subject matter – i.e. the body – by the elements that constitute the image – i.e. line and plane – is not to be taken as an abstraction of content; on the contrary, it stands in the context of an internally heightened hyperrealism: Klauke records a diaristic ‘illustration’ of the states of his experience of reality and wrests from the tide of time an inner moment of lived life for pictorial visualisation.
“In this way, text and image in Klauke’s diary facilitate two completely different approaches to contemporary events. Whilst the short fragments of sentences, generally placed at the upper edge of the image, draw upon external circumstances (who said / did what, how and why with / to whom?), the drawings refer to his own mental and emotional condition. The textual documentation and / or commentary of / on spent time is supplemented with an image of inner youth, of time experienced. The diary system developed by Klauke over ten years traces not only two parallel, adjacent expressive media, but also two levels of experience: a linguistic register of external reality is juxtaposed with a drawn register of its internal counterpart. The aim is not competition or interchangeability between these genres, but an approach to the complexity of the experience of reality. The multifariousness of what tends to be called reality is confirmed in the very disparity between text and image, that dialogue which can sometimes be so incomprehensible to outsiders, and given the temporal distance, probably even to Klauke himself. Written formulations are a response to the echoes of the world, to novelty, agitation or meaninglessness in the artist’s everyday life; the drawings locate the self. In this way, Klauke’s diary catches details that would be consigned to oblivion without the notes as well as moments of reflexive existential experience, branded into the memory as essential events. Predetermined Gregorian time and subjectively appropriated time, finitude and timelessness, are melded into a peculiar conglomerate of triviality and condition humaine.”