Kirsten Pieroth
24 Nov 2007 - 02 Feb 2008
At the beginning of Kirsten Pieroth’s exhibition at Klosterfelde, photographs are showing the dismounting of an exhibition label – Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is being robbed of its labelling at the Louvre museum in Paris. A vitrine contains the contract and correspondence that documents the process of the work Untitled (Loan) – it was the artist’s contribution for the group-show, Learn to Read, at Tate Modern in London to lend the label of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre to the Tate.
An official loan agreement for use accompanied the museum label on its way to London where it was mounted on the exhibition wall alongside with other works on display. The temporary label at the Louvre was reinstated again with the original after the London show had finished.
The work is illustrative of Pieroth’s approach, of appropriation and usage of formalized behaviour. The plaque has been exchanged in a commensurable institutional context and mounted at a standard height on the museum wall, the most natural place for an exhibition label. In that way it is masked as functional object - in the process, however, conventions of both the institutions and the museum’s visitors, for whose orientation the labelling plays an authoritative role, are being undermined at its new location.
In the next room, a raised hide installed in the exhibition space reveals the limits of a gallery as a viewing space. Taken from the Berlin environs of the Brandenburgisches Land and shortened to accommodate the gallery’s dimensions, the raised hide awkwardly invites a vista of the ‘white cube’ environment in which it now sits.
In the gallery’s office an old black safe has been installed. Reconfigured with a hidden stovepipe, a grate and an ash pit, the safe has thus acquired a double meaning with a twist of logic typical of the artist – in this safe, that is safe and unsafe at the same time, documents can not only be safeguarded, but also destroyed, if required.
In Kirsten Pieroth’s new works, common objects are being removed from their learned contexts by means of subtle manipulations, re-placements and appropriations of ritualized behaviour and brought into a state of mimicry or camouflage, out of which numerous levels of interpretation are being opened.
Over the past few years, Kirsten Pieroth (born 1970, living in Berlin) has been showing at the Frankfurt Portikus, the Vienna Secession, the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver and at Cubitt in London, as well as at numerous group-shows in Germany and abroad.
For further information, pleae contact the gallery
opening: 31st August 2007, 6 – 9pm
duration of the exhibition: 1st September – November 16th 2007
opening hours: Tuesdays through Saturdays 11 – 6 pm and by appointment
An official loan agreement for use accompanied the museum label on its way to London where it was mounted on the exhibition wall alongside with other works on display. The temporary label at the Louvre was reinstated again with the original after the London show had finished.
The work is illustrative of Pieroth’s approach, of appropriation and usage of formalized behaviour. The plaque has been exchanged in a commensurable institutional context and mounted at a standard height on the museum wall, the most natural place for an exhibition label. In that way it is masked as functional object - in the process, however, conventions of both the institutions and the museum’s visitors, for whose orientation the labelling plays an authoritative role, are being undermined at its new location.
In the next room, a raised hide installed in the exhibition space reveals the limits of a gallery as a viewing space. Taken from the Berlin environs of the Brandenburgisches Land and shortened to accommodate the gallery’s dimensions, the raised hide awkwardly invites a vista of the ‘white cube’ environment in which it now sits.
In the gallery’s office an old black safe has been installed. Reconfigured with a hidden stovepipe, a grate and an ash pit, the safe has thus acquired a double meaning with a twist of logic typical of the artist – in this safe, that is safe and unsafe at the same time, documents can not only be safeguarded, but also destroyed, if required.
In Kirsten Pieroth’s new works, common objects are being removed from their learned contexts by means of subtle manipulations, re-placements and appropriations of ritualized behaviour and brought into a state of mimicry or camouflage, out of which numerous levels of interpretation are being opened.
Over the past few years, Kirsten Pieroth (born 1970, living in Berlin) has been showing at the Frankfurt Portikus, the Vienna Secession, the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver and at Cubitt in London, as well as at numerous group-shows in Germany and abroad.
For further information, pleae contact the gallery
opening: 31st August 2007, 6 – 9pm
duration of the exhibition: 1st September – November 16th 2007
opening hours: Tuesdays through Saturdays 11 – 6 pm and by appointment