Hase, Krebs und Nachtigall
02 - 19 Apr 2008
HASE, KREBS UND NACHTIGALL
Eva Berendes
Gregor Hildebrandt
Bernd Ribbeck
Claudia Wieser
"Hase, Krebs und Nachtigall” is the title of the conclusion of a recently begun two-part exhibition series focussing on the works of younger artists mainly living in Berlin. Despite comparable approaches and the partly conscious use of a modernist formal vocabulary, the works of Eva Berendes, Gregor Hildebrandt, Bernd Ribbeck and Claudia Wieser hold enough points of friction within recent discussions of formalism.
In the simple and concentrated presentation of Eva Berendes' sculptural objects material inwardness appears to be gently put up for renegotiation in order aesthetically to sketch the variety and interwoven nature of these connections of forms with past styles, epochs and political artistic movements, as well as an always to be refined current more in addition to the sum of the individual parts.
Sound cassette tapes are predominantly the material of the artist Gregor Hildebrandt, which he uses in works on canvas but also in spatially expansive situations. In the process the cool shimmering black and the soft brown of the out-dated and nostalgic, anachronistic recording medium always appears as a doubly ambivalent projection surface – on the one hand for the memories of the past recording of the tapes and on the other for the new memory created from viewing the pictures made from them.
The fact that visual intensity and concentration can be created through voluntary limitation to a few implements such as ballpoint pen, permanent marker and touch-up pens in combination with a Sisyphus-like preoccupation with a small, recurring formal vocabulary, almost as if it was a matter of obliterating it through repeated drawing and over-drawing, is impressively demonstrated by the painting of Bernd Ribbeck unfolding in a small format, absent-minded and difficult to categorise aesthetically in its commitment to material and form.
Also interested in the strength of aesthetic experience, the artistic method of Claudia Wieser is subject to a less tight corset. It overlaps more media in choice of material, motif and colour, is also not shy of reductionism and in the process evokes no fewer enduring questions about the historicity of certain aesthetic styles and their use.
Christian Egger
Eva Berendes
Gregor Hildebrandt
Bernd Ribbeck
Claudia Wieser
"Hase, Krebs und Nachtigall” is the title of the conclusion of a recently begun two-part exhibition series focussing on the works of younger artists mainly living in Berlin. Despite comparable approaches and the partly conscious use of a modernist formal vocabulary, the works of Eva Berendes, Gregor Hildebrandt, Bernd Ribbeck and Claudia Wieser hold enough points of friction within recent discussions of formalism.
In the simple and concentrated presentation of Eva Berendes' sculptural objects material inwardness appears to be gently put up for renegotiation in order aesthetically to sketch the variety and interwoven nature of these connections of forms with past styles, epochs and political artistic movements, as well as an always to be refined current more in addition to the sum of the individual parts.
Sound cassette tapes are predominantly the material of the artist Gregor Hildebrandt, which he uses in works on canvas but also in spatially expansive situations. In the process the cool shimmering black and the soft brown of the out-dated and nostalgic, anachronistic recording medium always appears as a doubly ambivalent projection surface – on the one hand for the memories of the past recording of the tapes and on the other for the new memory created from viewing the pictures made from them.
The fact that visual intensity and concentration can be created through voluntary limitation to a few implements such as ballpoint pen, permanent marker and touch-up pens in combination with a Sisyphus-like preoccupation with a small, recurring formal vocabulary, almost as if it was a matter of obliterating it through repeated drawing and over-drawing, is impressively demonstrated by the painting of Bernd Ribbeck unfolding in a small format, absent-minded and difficult to categorise aesthetically in its commitment to material and form.
Also interested in the strength of aesthetic experience, the artistic method of Claudia Wieser is subject to a less tight corset. It overlaps more media in choice of material, motif and colour, is also not shy of reductionism and in the process evokes no fewer enduring questions about the historicity of certain aesthetic styles and their use.
Christian Egger