ELEVEN:
ARTISTS OF GALLERY
exhibition duration
November 14, 2020 - February 06, 2021
Exhibition view
In a time of distance and isolation, KANG Contemporary gallery is presenting eleven of its artists together, bringing their work into the foreground in the shared exhibition, Eleven: Artists of the Gallery.
ELEVEN: Artists of Gallery, 2020-2021, Kang Contemporary, Photo Florian Paninski
ELEVEN: Artists of Gallery, 2020-2021, Kang Contemporary, Photo Florian Paninski
ELEVEN ARTISTS
Lea Bräuer
In the course of the ongoing and progressive digitalization of photographic processes, both the process of creating and finding photographic images has changed fundamentally. Newly emerging sources of error are being masked by superficial advantages – such as more direct access to the medium, the simplification of previously technical and chemically complex processes, and a general acceleration of workflows. Whether in the translation of analog film grain into digital pixels or in post-production in familiar image processing programs – at every step, errors and damage can creep into the images, and they accumulate. Lea Bräuer appropriates these errors and disturbances, as well as the new, digital image-finding processes; she makes them her own and addresses them in her work, Volatil, which consists of five inkjet prints. The artist approaches individual phenomena in an exemplary manner and, by means of aesthetic exaggeration, gives space to accidental and planned misfortunes in her photographs.
Annette Cords
Annette Cords creates concise links between text and textile, image and code, surface and structure, thus highlighting multi-layered aspects of weaving. The exhibited works articulate weaving as a multifaceted, nuanced, and often underestimated language that picks up and complements developments in writing, painting, and abstraction. This also applies to particular weaving works that were created on a 12-shaft loom. Here Cords revises and expands the historical context and weaving structures of traditional American patterns called "overshot". In Blooming Leaf of Mexico, for example, the original name of the pattern refers to current political debates, while the further development of the weaving structure creates manifold interactions between color and pattern, leading to complex geometric abstractions.
FRANK COLDEWEY
Frank Coldewey's works shown at Eleven: Artists of the Galleryoscillate between painted sculptures and sculptural paintings. The architectural structures made of cardboard, matches, sewing thread, and other materials are consolidated with white acrylic varnish that render them just stable enough not to collapse. The works mounted on the wall thus secure their own improvised state in an extremely fragile manner. That their hanging in this way exposes them to the effects of gravity makes their fragile character apparent. At the same time, the longer they persist in this suspended position, the more obstinate they seem to be.
Dirk Eicken
Since the beginning of the 2000s, Dirk Eicken has concentrated on the use of photographs from contemporary events, including using them as a starting point for his multi-layered acrylic and oil paintings. In Eleven: Artists of the Gallery he shows a series of monochromatically painted pictures. The works consist of two canvases, with the lower, hidden layer depicting photorealistic portraits of refugees, while the upper layer covers these paintings. Each work is titled with the name of the portrayed fugitive. Eickens' interest in this method of non/visibility in connection with the theme of flight reflects the way the West deals with refugees and fugitives (namely, as unworthy). In this sense, Eicken reveals a repression, a willingness not to see.
Lisa Glauer
Formally, Lisa Glauer's artistic work is characterized by, among other things, her experimentation with a variety of techniques, materials and forms. In Landing Strip for the Milky Way, her last solo exhibition (2019) at KANG Contemporary, Glauer worked with a whole range of different media: with drawings in pencil and milk, a neon light work, a short film, an installation, and an analog linoleum print. For Eleven: Artists of the Gallerythe artist has chosen linocuts – colored images of organs – between abstraction and concreteness.
Vemo Hang
In her paintings, Vemo Hang explores various possibilities of combining and juxtaposing abstract pictorial elements and landscape images. For this she uses two types of images: wall-mounted, painterly sculptural installations on the one hand, and landscape painting on canvas on the other. In different ways, Hang invites the viewer to reflect on concepts of landscape and spatiality. While her sculptural installations depict exaggeratedly enlarged models of Go/Weiqi tokens, the landscapes in Hang's paintings are imaginary places that are seamlessly assembled from a multitude of independent scenes. The paintings are modern variants of Shanshui, a style of traditional Chinese landscape painting.
Meng Huang
The paintings of German Romanticism – and especially those of Caspar David Friedrich, such as The Monk by the Seaor Abbey in the Oakwood, both of which hang in the Old National Gallery in Berlin – have strongly impressed Meng Huang, who lives in both Berlin and Beijing. What fascinates Huang in these pictures is the relationship he notes to Chinese landscape painting, especially to that of the Song Dynasty (960-1279 AD). The four small-format works from his Waterscapeseries shown at Eleven: Artists of the Gallery also depict motifs that are often employed in both eras: clouds and water. But if – in contrast to many of Friedrich's paintings – no people are to be seen in Huang's paintings, this is also an expression of isolation and loneliness, of atmospheres of longing.
Moritz Jekat
The work of the artist and photographer Moritz Jekat focuses on Western, and especially German, society and its contemporary developments. Images of everyday curiosities, of things and places, combined with self-made installations and sculpture-like constructions, are part of Jekat's visual repertoire. In Eleven: Artists of the Gallery, Jekat shows images of arranged everyday objects in unexpected states. The lamp, the inflatable pool, the Apple computer – all familiar and yet all misplaced and disarranged.
Moritz Jekat:
"I am not worried" is about finding identity, experiencing adolescence, and discovering a new togetherness.
Witnessing my step-daughter in her early teenage years growing up in a new place and a new country inspired me to work on this series. Adolescence means physical and psychological development that culminates into adulthood; a shaping process of finding and defining yourself. This process now happens to be in a world that exists increasingly in digital spheres.
Images in shiny chrome frames, a print on flexible soft PVC, mounted on a horn-like chrome-pipe-installation, transports aesthetics which we know from digital parts of our lives.
One of the images show my stepdaughter Sionne in front of a grid-like, merging background, which is created by an algorithm. Just like her, it was given guidelines for its actions and bent to interpret them in their own way.
We too are bending ourselves and our surroundings in this place and time. The objects we surround ourselves within our life become screens and projections of our personality and identity.
By coincidence: red, green and blue, the colors of every screens’ LED that form an image for our eyes, are predominant here as an invitation to where all of this will go”.
Sabine Laidig
In her recent drawings and paintings, Sabine Laidig continues her examination of color, its materiality and its effect. Mathematics, measurement and metrics remain fundamental resources from which a concentrated abstraction arises. In an interplay of color application, pictorial rhythm and light effects, Laidig generates the finest nuances of spaces created by light, demanding our precise observation. The most apparent and characteristic features in her paintings are the extremely reduced application of few colour pigments and the slight variations in the rhythm of stripes and grid patterns. In Eleven: Artists of the Gallery, Laidig shows small format works created on MDF panels, which each in their own way confront us with colour, light, tone and rhythm as phenomena of our perception.
Gudrun Petersdorff
Gudrun Petersdorff paints figuratively in opaque colors – often in various shades of green, blue and violet. In the work shown in Eleven: Artists of the Gallery, the artist draws her motifs from trips to the German Baltic Sea, to the island of Usedom. Houses typical of seaside resorts are on view, framed by nature that appears sometimes still and sometimes activated. Human figures can hardly be seen in these wintery pictures, and if they are, they are represented only sparsely. Thus, a refreshing loneliness is suggested in Petersdorff's pictorial compositions.
Elisabeth Sonneck
Elisabeth Sonneck has developed a range of sculptural paper pictures over the years – scroll paintings, cylindrical objects. The artist thus creates abstract compositions that can also be used as spatial interventions; these sculptural elements have an effect on their surroundings and suggest possibilities interior spatial design. To represent dynamics and harmony by means of abstraction and restless forms, Sonneck uses very different color combinations and tonalities in her compositions. It is up to the viewer to decipher the overlays visible on the surfaces. Although the constructive moment can still be seen in the consistently soft-looking sculptures, the artist's presence is almost completely withdrawn from the works.
Text edit Carolyn Prescott
OPENING WITH PRE-REGISTRATION:
FRIDAY, 13.11.2020 FROM 2-9 PM