Archive (selection)

Archive (selection)

2024
  • Exhibition: Hoi Köln, 3.2. – 24.3.2024
    Bild: Paul Coker Jr.
    Part 3: Nightmare of Painting

    Opening: Friday, 2. February, 6 pm

    Marie Angeletti, Monika Baer, BLESS, Vittorio Brodmann, Jakob Buchner, Milena Büsch, Merlin Carpenter, Matthias Groebel, Fischli Weiss, Hansi Fuchs, Sophie Gogl, Hamishi Farah, Jacqueline Humphries, Dozie Kanu, Nora Kapfer, Morag Keil, Emil Michael Klein, Maggie Lee, Lorenza Longhi, Alan Michael, Kaspar Müller, Vera Palme, Gunter Reski, Jean-Frédéric Schnyder, Dennis Scholl, Nolan Simon, Dominik Sittig, Lucie Stahl, Megan Francis Sullivan, Alfred d’Ursel, Amelie von Wulffen, Jie Xu, Barbara Zenner, Damon Zucconi

    Faced with this rectangular void, anything could happen. The horizon of possibilities seems open. At any moment, an idea could flicker into my consciousness, and I’d be able to get it all on the canvas. Still better, perhaps, the brush could just start moving and the painting, sleepwalker-like, paint itself without me. The void gleams auspiciously; but never for long. Whatever image I may have had in my mind’s eye, it is wrecked by the first brushstroke. Its utter fatuousness is exposed. And every additional brushstroke just makes it worse. If one seems weak, the next, which was supposed to strengthen it, has come straight out of the repertoire of cheap effects. This merry-go-round of recycled gimmicks revolves with a deadening regularity. What’s left for you to do when the dice were all cast in the last century? Hum and ha, paint small paintings, paint huge paintings, dive into abstraction and the morass of ambition, revive formalism, figuration, raise tornados of pigment, embrace minimalism, flirt with technology. Subjects and points of reference change, but their form stays stuck to the ground, as if it were covered with some repulsive, viscous liquid. Trembling, the emoji in oil tries to pull itself out of the morass, drawing long strands behind itself like chewing gum. Brushstrokes as identity crises, with filaments trailing from their lips like burst bubbles of gum.

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    Curated by Valérie Knoll.

    The exhibition is generously supported by:


    Image: Paul Coker Jr.

2023
  • Exhibition: Hoi Köln, 2.12.2023 – 21.1.2024
    Part 2: In the Belly of the Machine

    Marie Angeletti, Monika Baer, BLESS, Vittorio Brodmann, Jakob Buchner, Milena Büsch, Merlin Carpenter, Matthias Groebel, Fischli Weiss, Hansi Fuchs, Sophie Gogl, Hamishi Farah, Jacqueline Humphries, Dozie Kanu, Nora Kapfer, Morag Keil, Emil Michael Klein, Maggie Lee, Lorenza Longhi, Alan Michael, Kaspar Müller, Vera Palme, Gunter Reski, Jean-Frédéric Schnyder, Dennis Scholl, Nolan Simon, Lucie Stahl, Megan Francis Sullivan, Alfred d’Ursel, Amelie von Wulffen, Jie Xu, Barbara Zenner, Damon Zucconi

    Artificial intelligence is making great strides, generative systems are reaching new heights of image and text production. But what does it mean for painting if it can be produced by computing robots?

    In the past, technological advances often marked the beginning of long periods in which art shed its skin in revolutionary transformation. Before these advances, human beings could still flatter themselves that the privilege of creating things was theirs alone. After them, when they suddenly found themselves overtaken by technology, they had to confront their own limitations. Impressionism emerged form art’s dialogue with the new invention of photography, while a great deal of postmodern painting was inspired by the experience of computers. Right now we stand at the dawn of another period of this kind, in which human-made art must struggle against its own reflection in technology. What are these machines capable of, and what are the limits of their capabilities? By posing the question of how they differ from machines, and by finding their own niche, human beings can engage with technology to achieve a better understanding of themselves.

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    Curated by Valérie Knoll

    The exhibition in genereously supported by:

    Photo: Mareike Tocha

  • Exhibition: Hoi Köln, 29.9. – 19.11.2023
    Bild: Basel Tourismus/Peter Ziegler
    Part 1: Welcoming the Space

    With Marie Angeletti, Monika Baer, BLESS, Vittorio Brodmann, Jakob Buchner, Milena Büsch, Merlin Carpenter, Hamishi Farah, Fischli Weiss, Hansi Fuchs, Sophie Gogl, Matthias Groebel, Jacqueline Humphries, Dozie Kanu, Nora Kapfer, Morag Keil, Emil Michael Klein, Maggie Lee, Lorenza Longhi, Alan Michael, Kaspar Müller, Vera Palme, Gunter Reski, Jean-Frédéric Schnyder, Dennis Scholl, Nolan Simon, Lucie Stahl, Megan Francis Sullivan, Alfred d’Ursel, Amelie von Wulffen, Jie Xu, Barbara Zenner, Damon Zucconi

    Where I come from, “hoi” is what people say when they greet each other in the street. I’ve come to Cologne because I love painting, and can think of no better place to engage seriously with this medium. That’s why I’m welcoming my first exhibition here with an overview of the current state of one of visual art’s oldest genres. Painting is especially exciting right now, and this has nothing to do with my own passion for it; it is rather that a lot of people are painting again and that art’s questions are again up for negotation. This doesn’t mean that it’s going to be easy for painting to find its way forward. Its own history casts a long shadow over its current flowering like an implacable judgement. However, its difficulties lie not so much behind as ahead of it. Since painting develops slowly, it needs to be able to imagine an enduring future, one where it can eventually hope to arrive by creeping along at its own modest pace.

    Right now, it is not just that the future is clouded over – it has become hard to imagine at all. Are people painting in the hope that the future, currently hidden behind a fog of dystopias and disaster scenarios, will eventually reappear? To keep on painting while everything familiar seems to be crumbling around you could be seen as an expression of the “principle of hope,” a way of resisting a world that has embraced darkness through the determination to see a light at the end of the tunnel. In this case, painting would be a way of going against the grain, of rising above social conventions with a wan smile.

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    Curated by Valérie Knoll

    The exhibition is generously supported by:

    Image: Basel Tourismus/Peter Ziegler

  • Solo Exhibition: Marie Angeletti – ram spin cram, 1.4. – 2.7.2023

    For her first institutional show in Germany, ram spin cram, Marie Angeletti (*1984) is presenting newly commissioned works across the entire building of the Kölnischer Kunstverein.

    Decisively articulated, each element — sculpture, photography, and video — receives equal attention. ram spin cram does not begin in the main gallery nor ends in the last room upstairs, it is all there at once. Each room can be read as a series of actions accumulated over time. The main gallery shows work made within the last two months. In the cinema, in the upstairs and basement gallery spaces, Angeletti has rearranged works from an unspecified period of time.

    Thanks to Nikola, Stefan, Line, Gianna, Henrik, Gérard, Anne, Anna, Olga, John, Michele, Dora, Matt, Tonio, Jakob, Lucas, Richard, Annie, Daniel, Jordan, Seb, Medhi, Toni, Pippa, Tim, Marco, Varun, Sol.

    Thanks Istal, Marseille, to have financed the production of the metal beams, and Quadrissimo, Marseille, for the prints on silver and Daniela Taschen for having hosted me in Cologne.

    Marie Angeletti (*1984 in Marseille, lives in New York) has exhibited at museums such as the Centre d’edition contemporain in Geneva; Künstlerhaus Bremen; Musée de la ville de Paris; Le Consortium, Dijon; Kunsthaus Glarus; Kunsthalle Zürich; Treize, Paris; Castillo/Corrales, Paris; and in galleries including the Galerie Lars Friedrich, Berlin; Edouard Montassut, Paris; Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York; Greene Naftali, New York.

    Curated by Nikola Dietrich

    ram spin cram Text

    Marie Angeletti, Men at Work, 2023, slideshow, 12:45 min, Courtesy: Édouard Montassut, Paris / Galerie Lars Friedrich, Berlin

    The exhibition is supported by:

2022
  • Exhibition: Game of No Games, 13.11.2022 – 5.3.2023
    William Scott, Untitled, 2013.
    Instructions for Walking in High Spirits
    William Scott in Game of No Games. Instructions for Walking in High Spirits, 2022. Installationview Kölnischer Kunstverein, 2022. Courtesy: The Museum of Everything. Photo: Mareike Tocha.

    This exhibition presents historical and contemporary works by artists who have received little attention throughout art history. Their participation in society and the art world has been limited—as a result of conservatorships, disenfranchisement, or discrimination, to name a few. This is closely associated with the lack of stable institutional footholds or larger (art) networks and support systems. Conventional categorizations, such as Outsider Art or Art Brut, along with the concurrent emphasis on their alleged distinguishing characteristics—which have so far often been read as narratives on the spontaneous vs. planned, innate vs. learned, naïve vs. sophisticated, or even primitive vs. modern—are currently considered outdated and must be critically challenged. Accordingly, this exhibition intends to encourage a different understanding concerning established ways of thinking in the art world, as well as consolidate an approach to exhibiting and representing different artistic practices that is more readily assimilated.

    Through their works, the artists on view at the Kölnischer Kunstverein immerse themselves in self-alienating role-playing games. They can thus take on different identities and undergo a kind of metamorphosis—to the point of becoming animals. “I’m a frigging hunter, but I know that it causes trouble… I have to mask it [what is troublesome] so that I can continue to exist in society at all,” the artist Rabe perplexum declared (in Experimente, Der unbekannte Künstler, 1987). In both her works and life, she adopted a raven persona.

    Our aim is not to place the exhibited artists and their artistic practices in the margins of society, nor to portray them as artists that unveil repressed realities or develop suppressed longings behind their apparent detachment from the world. Rather, this exhibition explores how they deliberately work with their dependencies. Adelhyd van Bender, for instance, designed a large and complex body of work that breaks the world into mathematical formulas. Intertwining these with biographical details in associative chains, his practice builds a new order. As a model for his drawings, which were copied and revised several times, he often used letters addressed to him from official authorities, which testified to his constant struggle against the prolongation of his conservatorship.

    These artists have often positioned themselves within society, precisely in the non-places of art and interstitial spaces where a larger public could be found, so as to relate to this community and criticize it with a matter-of-factness that is peculiar to each of them. By leaving behind social conventions, norms, and dominant traditions, as well as undermining social or gender performances, these artists have frequently been met with a lack of understanding. This was certainly the case for Helga Goetze, who broke away from a conventional way of life in the 1970s and later advocated free love, sex, and female pleasure almost daily in front of the Memorial Church in Berlin.

    The radical potential of the works gathered here resides in the fact that they insist on unfulfilled socio-political promises and, as Dietrich Orth hints at in one of his works that gives the exhibition its title, provide instructions and suggestions for a better, fairer way of treating one another. They manifest a profound longing directed toward the future—something that can also be understood as a critique of the present.

    This exhibition was curated by Nikola Dietrich and Susanne Zander.

    With works by Adelhyd van Bender, Klaus Beyer, Lee Godie, Helga Sophia Goetze, Margarethe Held, Dietrich Orth, Albert Leo Peil, Rabe perplexum, William Scott, Wendy Vainity, and August Walla.


    Image: William Scott, Untitled, 2013, Courtesy of The Museum of Everything



    The exhibition is supported by:

    Further support: Jan Fischer, Entrepreneur and supporter of the Kölnischer Kunstverein and the NRW Kunstvereins landscape

  • Exhibition: Member's Edition 2022, 13.11. – 4.12.2022

    with Rosa Aiello, Genoveva Filipovic, Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff, Manfred Holtfrerich, Erika Landström, Luzie Meyer, José Montealegre, Dala Nasser, Daniela Ortiz, Thomas Ruff, John Russell, Jasmin Werner

    Opening of the exhibition: Saturday, 12.11.2022, 7 pm

    Orders for the Jahresgaben 2022 can be submitted in writing from November 12 up to and including December 04, 2022. If more orders are received than there are copies available, the decision will be made by drawing lots. The draw will take place on December 05, 2022. After the draw, all interested parties will be notified of the result by e-mail. All remaining Jahresgaben will remain for sale after the draw and can be purchased at any time.

    The Jahresgaben and editions are an exclusive offer exclusively for members of the Kölnischer Kunstverein. Other interested parties are entitled to purchase by joining the Kölnischer Kunstverein in the current calendar year.

    Please note our ordering procedures and the general terms & conditions.

    The exhibition is supported by:

  • Solo Exhibition: José Montealegre Nervous System, 20.8. – 16.10.2022
    José Montealegre: Nervous System, 2022.

    Opening: Friday, 19.8.2022, 7 pm

    In his first institutional solo exhibition Nervous System at the Kölnischer Kunstverein, José Montealegre continues his ongoing series of works from 2020 titled Páginas. The starting point for these sculptures is an extensive botanical archive of plant illustrations created in the course of the Spanish colonization of Mexico and published as Nova Plantarum Animalium et Mineralium Mexicanorum (1628). The archive saw the catalogization and re-systematization of hundreds of indigenous plants by the colonizers. In rich detail, Montealegre translates these botanical illustrations into copper sculptures and presents them on the second floor of the Kunstverein. In his artistic practice, which also includes writing, the artist tells stories that blur the line between origin and (mis)translation. Contrary to knowledge shaped by colonial powers, Montealegre allows marginalized perspectives to emerge thus challenging canonical history(ies).

    The exhibition will be followed by the first publication of José Montealegre.


    Methodologies I

    One. Like a protagonist in a cartoon drawing entering the revolving snout of a concrete goosebump city like, for example, New York, my brass-buckled leather briefcase snaps unshut and all my papers fly away. Now I’m late. Now I’m poor. Now I have dreams. Now they fly away. 

    Two. It is awfully obvious that any conversation about the methodologies of art begins and surely ends with life. Begins because it is the spring which taps the well. Ends because bloated goldfish are prey for hawks. 

    Three. Document whirlwind. Papercut city. The nerve, the nerves, nervous nerve of steel. The page tornado scatters order and logic, thus rendering the business pitch to be delivered into an unintelligible levitation where bureaucracy has no grasp and the tendril tether fails to anchor root. A misfiring neuron is perhaps what you have. 

    Four. Upon which I realize that what is sought cannot be accidental. The person who fails to hem the hole in their pocket is called a benefactor. 

    Five. It is the spinning paper cyclone that so destroyed my life, the site of the worlds autolysis. Where the invisible is not only seen but transforms. The papers levitated are crumpled into orbs. They hold, hide, and corrupt information. It is to look down into the well and see the golden meniscus that refracts the light, it is the cast and wilting blossom that falls gently on the surface of the water and is blown about by the wind, it is the goldfish that swims clumsily if not in grace and the talon that breaks its peace and plunges into the water and takes that goldfish into another ecstatic world. 

    Six. In May 2020 I downloaded a digital copy of the Nova Plantarum Animalium et Mineralium Mexicanorum (1628) from Biodiversitylibrary.org to a thumb drive. Then I took that thumb drive to a student printer. There I printed it in black and white on recycled paper. Leather bound front cover and all. The 1,104-page stack of documents has hundreds of drawings of plants and animals found in present day Mexico and Central America. Each drawing is accompanied by a Nahuatl name that has been scattered by the empires and a Latin name that has been reinterpreted by modern botany. Since printing this version of the ‘Nova Plantarum’ I have been going through the book almost every day. I look at the plants and sometimes, recognize them instantly. Other times it takes me months to realize that I have seen them in the past, but most remain unknown to me. When I google their name, nothing comes up. Familiar only through these drawings, I see faint possibilities in the landscape. When I feel like it and when I start to realize that I know them sculpturally, I make a sculpture of the drawing. So far, I have made around eighty plant sculptures. There are hundreds remaining. Every time I leaf through the black and white printer copy of this book I create a new order within it. The leather cover is now in the middle of the book with tons of scribbles and notations. Its order has become irrational and irrelevant. The page numbers jump by the hundreds. I have lost pages. I have crumpled them. I have stained them.


    Text: José Montealegre


    Methodologies II

    One. Looking at
    First look at the white walls, second look at the tiled floor. Looking around. Looking down. Get on your knees. Get closer. Discover. Repeat.

    Two. Claiming
    In 1517, during the Spanish colonization of the Americas, naturalist and physician Francisco Hernández de Toledo was sent to the first scientific and botanical expedition. The result of a seven-year expedition was an extensive botanical archive in the form of an illustrated manuscript with schematic drawings commissioned from Nahua painters. It was then stored in the Escorial Monastery, re-structured by the Italian medic Nardo Recchi, partly lost in a fire, and eventually published 100 years later under the title Nova Plantarum, Animalium, et Mineralium Mexicanorum historia in 1628.

    Three. Knowing
    Seeing, naming, knowing. The names of the plants in the book are both in Nahuatl and in Latin. Yet, since the references have been partially lost through appropriation, acquisition, and translation, attempts to find an equivalent in today’s botany are not always successful. As we walk through the city of Cologne, I see a strikingly dominant plant that has broken through the curb. “Didn’t you notice that paving stones in German cities are always in arches?”, he asked. Thinking through craft.

    Four. Narrating
    In 2013, I visited José Montealegre in his studio for the first time. He had just moved from Managua to Frankfurt am Main to start his studies at the Städelschule in the class of Willem de Rooij. I remember looking at, or rather observing, platforms of tiles on low pedestals on the floor displaying miniature jungle worlds in clay, at reliefs of tiny skeletons on the wall next to framed, seemingly historical book pages. It was with surprise when I found that those documents were fictional: digital prints on blank pages torn out of used books. Overwriting histories. Rewriting history. Reclaiming the narrative.

    Five. Expanding
    Montealegre’s works have the potential to extend beyond their edges. Like four rectangular cutouts of a larger environment, they seem to grow, to evolve, to reproduce. Outside, the mirroring surfaces of the plastic containers, used in Honduras to collect rainwater and hand wash clothes, reflect their surroundings. Stained-glass squares echo the influence of Catholic iconography and craft and the all-consuming European narrative. The Renaissance in Europe brought on not only the concept of perspective in art but also colonial expansion.

    Six. Collapsing
    What copper and nerves have in common is that they are both electrical transmitters. “Don’t trust me, I’m not telling you the truth”, he says. Trembling and shaking. Restructuring knowledge and power. Returning agency.


    Text: Miriam Bettin

    Curator: Miriam Bettin


    José Montealegre (*1992 in Tegucigalpa, Honduras) lives and works in Berlin. He studied philosophy and literature at the Universidad Centroamericana de Managua, Nicaragua, and with Willem de Rooij at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main. His work has been shown in solo exhibitions at the Klosterruine in Berlin, Mountains in Berlin (both 2021), Convent Art Space in Ghent (2019), and in group exhibitions including Lantz’scher Skulpturenpark Lohausen in Düsseldorf (2021), Städelmuseum in Frankfurt am Main, Natalia Hug in Cologne (both 2019), Futura Gallery in Prague, Gillmeier Rech in Berlin (both 2018), and Kunsthalle Darmstadt (2017, 2014). Parallel to the solo exhibition at the Kölnischer Kunstverein, a group show curated by José Montealegre and Rebekka Seubert is on view at the Dortmunder Kunstverein (until 30.10.2022).


    Supported by:

  • Solo Exhibition: John Russell CAVAPOOL, 20.8. – 16.10.2022
    John Russell, Cavapool, 2022.

    Opening: Friday, 19.8.2022, 7 pm


    Hello … hello … woof woof woof!

    My eyes are like watery ‘pools of love’, welling up, imminent to your arrival, as I stand here above you, waiting … woof woof! Looking down the stairs at you. … a coquettish mut.

    Heeeeello,” you say as you walk up the stairs, “Ooo you are a sweetie … what do you want us to do?”

    And there is something in my gesture, implied in the half-turn of my body, in the appealing angle of my head, in the slight skewing of my stance, in the skilfully painted wetness of my nose, in the hand-tooled seduction of my curls and fur, even in the suggestion of a flirtatious smile playing at the corner of my jaw …

    Woof woof!
    Oh sly coercion!
    Oh finely crafted insinuation!

    And then, as I trot along beside you, your spirit animal, as we enter the main exhibition space, breathing in the perfume of pine and maybe the hint of sandlewood – cleaning fluid or maybe air-freshener. Woof woof woof! And the succulent shine underfoot of glassy concrete.

    O this is amazing!” you exclaim, as the light bursts in on you.

    The ruptured gash, down through broken rock, a view of aquatic spectacle, a chasm into entangled swirls of waves, clouds, cliffs, skies, submerged architecture; baroque loops of liquid seduction, watery death and sunlit ripples. The horror of the ‘depictive’, coy perspectival fakery, the crude invitation of base representation for the sake of representation with its tricks and returns and re-animations, moving across the surface, the shine and glamour mixing desire and phantoms, as deluge or flood; ‘crafted with time-honoured technique and skill’ … woof woof! A proposal for glimmering surfaces and depths, doubled down and crowded with abstractions so clearly always only ever one millimetre thick; impishly critiquing the murderous ideology of ‘seductive surfaces and hidden depths’.

    And all the while the gloss feels so strange on my paws. I yelp slightly and you all laugh, “O you adorable pup!”

    And as we tip-tap across the floor of the of the former British Council building, where previously they used to present and promote Cold-War British high-art culture. O my doggy heart! On one level, this is a similarly trivial representational spectacle … but on another level … no … always this! Always only this!

    “Ha ha ha ha,” you laugh as we make our way across the ravine. And on the far side, horizontally and vertically aligned, a row of fly sculptures spaced across the span – a row of punctuation marks, of black dots. One of them is perhaps, frozen mid-flight in front of a flower, as an ‘anti-bee’ … not the happy, furry, orange, ecological pollinator whose buzz delights but more like the symbols of death and decay from Dutch still life, or just the vermin that cluster in the dirt. Woof woof woof! Or on closer inspection … on closer inspection … Rorschach ink blots … maybe you can see the head of Max Wall, English music hall star, famous for his character Professor Wallofski, comedy piano routines and acting in Beckett plays.

    Or maybe you can see me in the fly, can you pick out my adorable form mixed in … a Cavafloo? Or perhaps a charming Cavaflooloolooolooo to mimic the sound of a song bird perhaps. But anyway….

    Cavafloolooloo…” we cry out as we make our way out again.

    As I am trotting by your feet. Eager. With a look of love when you look down. Now leaping down the stairs and at one point I stumble, a bundle of fur tumbling down. Then back on my feet. Too full of juice! Too full of life!

    “Woof woof … follow me … down here” I cry. Such a cute docent. And downwards.

    “O this is wonderful!” you cry.

    And we walk down to the basement space, only partly accessible, roped off. A goat. Viewed from the raised foyer space. And another fly, sitting on the eyelid of the goat (an historical ecstatic fly! The same fly as sat on the eyelid of Margaret Thatcher as she died.)

    The goat – most damned of creatures, not least in its repeated use in art. O cursed spawn how many more times must its carcass be reanimated in artistic context. Dragged out to metaphorical affect! And here we are again, observing its satirical form with initially sad expression, clambering across a rock outcrop, in the style of German medieval realism. Folds of fleece highlighted, rendered in oil and gloss varnish, possibly mocking the echo of William Holman Hunt’s famous ‘Scapegoat’ painting of 1892, or the mascot of Cologne FC who was, on one occasion, punched by the fans of an opposing team. Doubling down its religious schtick in its gaze out to the viewer (as implicated). Bloated with sin; as a scapegoat or indexing other formats of art-goats, or cultural goats, erotic, mythological, occult etc. As well as being just a goat. This is a specific goat indicative of its own specific potentialities. And the maggots (baby flies) on the goat’s legs and in the folds of its fleece.

    Woof woof woof! “OK OK ! And where are we going now? Ha ha ha” We want to move on and there is a brief worry “Are we ghosts?” we all shriek. “Are we phantoms? Ha ha ha!”

    Such fun! And ascending back up, spiralling back up. Upstairs past the posters; amalgamations of sales pitch, supermarket pitch and politics, where sits, on the wall, on the first floor, the painted portrait of the goat, rendered in bas relief and oil, in the style, or spirit, of ‘A picture of Dorian Gray’, where the subject remains youthful and beautiful and the painting deteriorates. That old goat is smiling happily at us in its whiskery decay.

    And close by the goat painting, the painting of a crow, standing on a stump picking off ants on the ground below. The ants labour collectively but are snatched away by a force above them, greater than them.

    “Woof woof … that old crow … if I get my teeth into his feathers! Ha! Then he would feel my force … if only for a few seconds as I shake him dead! Ha ha! Woof woof!”

    “O darling so violent! Leave him … leave him … he isn’t worth it!”

    “Woof woof … give me just one minute and I will stop him plucking at our collective labour! Ha ha! Woof woof!”

    Woof woof! And finally, one more visit, one more leg on the trip, one more refrain, one last date, one last chapter, verse, prayer, homily, rapture, dream… Yes, to the cinema! The theatre of dreams! A sojourn in the darkness. In the shadows. Amongst the images projected on the screen. The crow features briefly and the ants … and the fly makes a fleeting appearance, drenched in the searing heat of rural France, the melting pollen, mosquitoes and coagulating history. Yes, you can sit back in the cushioned seats. I shall maybe trot up and down in the aisle. As we watch an ‘intense dialogue between two commuters, one taking the form of a Giacometti sculpture, choreographed across the platforms of a suburban train station’. As they search for the allusive Egghead.

    Egghead wants his eggs back!

    Egghead wants … woof woof!


    Sweltering intensity, warm to the bones, into your flesh, into your skull and teeth. Woof woof woof woof!

    And now in waves moving down. We flow outwards. And then lapping, flowing down the stairs and leaking out under the main doors, out into the street … joyous new cavapools in the street, across the pavement, in visions down through the concrete, under the paving stone. Gently lapping waters.

    O joy!

    Woof woof!


    Text: John Russell

    Curator: Nikola Dietrich


    John Russell (*1963 in London) studied History of Art at Goldsmiths College of Art and Fine Art at Slade School of Art and Saint Martin’s School of Art. He was a co-founder of the artists’ group BANK, of which he was a member for ten years. Since leaving BANK in January 2000, Russell has worked both independently and collaboratively in producing exhibitions, curatorial projects, and artist books. His work has been shown in solo exhibitions including Bridget Donahue in New York (2021 and 2018), High Art in Paris (2017), Kunsthalle Zürich (2017) and in group exhibitions at Viborg Kunsthal, DK (2018), Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow (2018), Galerie Crèvecoeur in Paris (2018), Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin (2017), Artists Space in New York (2014), The New Art Gallery Walsall, UK (2013), ICA in London (2011), Focal Point Gallery in Southend, UK (2011), The Grey Area in Brighton (2011), Kunsthalle Exnergasse in Vienna(2011), Tate Britain in London (2010), and Tate St Ives in Cornwall, UK (2009).


    Supported by:

  • Solo Exhibition: Dala Nasser – Red in Tooth, 14.5. – 26.6.2022
    Dala Nasser: Red in Tooth, 2022. Design: Leen Charafeddine.

    Opening: Friday, 13.5.2022, 7 pm

    Kölnischer Kunstverein is pleased to present Dala Nasser’s first institutional solo exhibition Red in Tooth, featuring her multi-media installation of the same title. Comprising a video work, patchwork paintings, and a commissioned sound installation in collaboration with sound artist Mhamad Safa, Red in Tooth is the point of origination for her ongoing examination of decolonial ecologies and human and non-human entanglement. It’s a grounding proposal of how to listen, smell, see and sense what has been tuned down/out and made invisible by the ongoing practices of extraction and protracted colonial erasure.

    Building on her practice as a material and process-based artist, through abstraction and alternative forms of image making, she cultivates a necessary discomfort through a renewed trust in the land, its rivers, and its more-than-human inhabitants. The works trace the Al Wazzani River, which flows through southern Lebanon into Occupied Palestine. Along this splintered journey, Nasser is forced to abandon state road infrastructures that are built to keep us in their lanes, and follow the soil and its color and smell, the burble of water, and other inhabitants of these lands; the animals; through vast wild ‘virgin’ terrains of southern Lebanon leading us to the border defying Wazzani. This frontier, which breeds life in its natural resources and wildlife is only partially accessible to a few families who live in the immediate area – and under difficult conditions. The trial to bear witness to ongoing slow violence, dispossession, and other colonial practices under constantly shifting, changing, and morphing conditions is (nearly) impossible. Nasser’s insistence to be guided by other environmental signifiers in her ongoing exercise to consider other possible social and political imaginaries, begs the question of how we listen to more-than-human ecological knowledges around us. How do we re-calibrate our relationship to the land and its wildlife and other beings, to find a way to listen to their unuttered testimonies? How can we learn from them to navigate the cracks of rigid colonial structures; both material and those of collective memory(s), history(s), and archives?

    Reverting to a seemingly ritualistic intuition, the paintings have been dug into the earth around the Wazzani, washed with collected rainwater and/or boiled in salt water, they smell of the wretched soil and carry accumulated matter within it. They are imprinted with an-other memory, reality, and futurity; years of erosion, degradation, loss of water, pollution, and increased salinity imbued with a history of natural life, extraction, death, blood, violence, and land grabs. It’s an attempt to listen to the soil, its ailments and hopes, through that which has truly witnessed and continues to survive there. The large patchwork piece has been reassembled for the lecture hall (Riphahnsaal), the paintings are suspended and cascaded down from the stage to the center where they disharmoniously meet the accompanying site-specific sound installation. The sound work, a collaboration with sound artist and architect Mhamad Safa, manipulates the temporality of the environment through time-based effects. It brings our attention to the crackles of the field recordings from the river and its surrounding area, the birds, the crickets, the wind. The result is an immersive abstracted visual, sonic, and olfactory conditioning that urges us towards a slower, more focused reading and sensing.

    In the second space, the video work negotiates and reveals other possibilities of being and relating through learning from the intricate nuances and complexities of the genuinely decolonial species, terrain, and wildlife of the area. Narrated by the wildlife as witnesses whose testimonies have no words, the film transitions between moving shots of a road most traveled, human produced waste, constructed borders, political signage, existing topographical markers animated as imaginary lines, the inhabitant’s voices, dead and living animals, and long, beautiful, desolate imagery of landscapes of southern Lebanon and northern Occupied Palestine. Through a studied use of imagery and sound, Nasser, at times, paints an impressionist-like painting that transports us to and from an-other possible way of life and lived reality.

    The exhibition demands a multisensorial presence and engagement as colonial practices and landscape are abstracted within the spaces on a material, olfactory, sonic, and visual level. Red in Tooth is a reminder that we have made the wrong decisions, we have trusted the wrong materials, we have been listening to the testimonies of those who have not witnessed for too long. It reveals to us an entrapped power dynamic between colonial structures, people, animals, plants, the river, and the soil, and invites us through Nasser’s subtle but radical language of abstraction to consider different forms of mobility and relationship to the land.

    Text: Reem Shadid

    The exhibition was curated by Nikola Dietrich.

    Dala Nasser (*1990 in Tyre, lives in Beirut, Lebanon) recently had solo exhibitions at VO Curations in London and Deborah Schamoni in Munich (2022, and 2021). She participated in a number of group exhibitions, including Centre Pompidou in Paris (2022), Villa Emplain in Brussels (2021), Beirut Art Center (2019); Bétonsalon – Centre d’art et de recherche in Paris (2019); Victoria Miro in London (2018); François Ghebaly Gallery in Los Angeles (2018); and ACT2 of the Sharjah Biennial 13 (2017).

    Dala Nasser: Red in Tooth, 2022. Design: Leen Charafeddine.


  • Solo Exhibition: Loretta Fahrenholz - Gap Years, 19.3. – 26.6.2022
    Loretta Fahrenholz, 2022. Courtesy: die Künstlerin und Galerie Buchholz.


    Opening of the exhibition: Friday, 18.03.2022, 7 pm

    Gap year: a reprieve from work and responsibility, time off before time starts again – or a chunk of time that lands in your lap when society unexpectedly stops.

    A vast and relatively unregulated space, Berlin’s Tempelhofer Feld is built on ruptures reflected in its various historical incarnations, among other functions Germany’s first football training ground, a 19th century Sunday destination, NS parade site, a concentration camp, and, of course, Berlin’s airport during the Cold War Airlift. Fahrenholz’ photo series Gap Years depicts the flourishing of leisure activities and new hobbies during the pandemic, when the Feld became everyone’s cafe, gym, bar, club, pick-up spot and music venue. Recorded with strobe-like time-lapse photography that registers movement like in a frozen jelly, the works in the series show people in self-defence classes, playing ping-pong, roller-skating, or engaging in impromptu raves and remote-controlled car driving, open-air bondage and snacking. There is also a blurry close-up of tahini poured on one of the unpopular e-scooters (we are among irritable Berliners all right).

    The contemporaneity of the activities cannot hide the belle-époque quaintness of the motif of leisure, or what Fahrenholz identifies as its ‘kitsch’ aspect. We have no illusions about leisure activities. As carefully measured breaks in the regime of work they can be the next best thing to being stuck in a rut. And in an urban context the display of street skill and everyday virtuosity is already inscribed in a layered visual economy: Fahrenholz’ photos trail instagrammable styles of social-media self-consumption but also the heroics of sports photography. Still, the social collapse of the pandemic provided an opportunity for other rhythms, for social reorganization on a micro-level, thus creating a space in which it was possible to get in touch with both dystopia and utopia.

    The film Happy Birthday (2022) emulates the perspective of a first-person shooter video game through a sole protagonist who wanders aimlessly across the Tempelhofer Feld. Little windows appear with snippets of mobile-phone-recorded birthday greetings. As the film progresses, darkness falls on the lonely social choreography, a non-celebration with long-distance missives from friends and family who should have been present. The birthday boy’s blank expression and the absence of action build up emotional pressure and expectation, as the air around him is perforated with songs, encouragements or scolding, shared memories, saucy messages, and existential musings.

    What is left, where are we now? Where do we go from here? – These questions emerge from the darkness surrounding the figures in Fahrenholz’ two works. To Henri Lefebvre, the ‘rhythmanalyst’ is someone who studies rhythms as a structure for the experience of space and time – someone who listens to “all sorts of already known practices” but first of all “to his body; he learns rhythm from it, in order consequently to appreciate external rhythms. His body serves him as a metronome.” What would Lefebvre’s rhythmanalyst make of a pandemic time out of whack? Lefebvre’s notion of the body as a metronome takes on other signification, both when held against the digitally scripted movements of the Happy Birthday protagonist and Gjon Mili’s photographic experiments from the mid-20th century that inspired Fahrenholz for her Gap Years series. New strobe technology enabled Mili to capture movement by arresting the human body in sequences in a single photographic image: Picasso making a drawing with light, a ballet dancer’s stride across the stage. Mili’s is a kind of portraiture in which psychology is reduced, or even effaced, in favour of speed.

    In 1960s counterculture the spasmodic gestation of the strobe was employed to chop up time and dissolve the body. Tom Wolfe describes the dance floor of a 1960s ‘acid test’:

    Ecstatic dancers – their hands flew off their arms, frozen in the air – a gleaming ellipse of teeth here, a pair of buffered highlit cheekbones there – all flacking and fragmenting into images as in an old flicker movie – a man in slices! – all of history pinned up on a butterfly board; the experience, of course.

    The psychedelic sensibility for the non-human side of technology inspired the filmmaker Jonas Mekas to say that “since there is nothing but the white light in [the strobe], it represents…the point of death, or nothingness.” But it is not only visual shrapnel; there is a theoretical bent in the strobe, too, a crystalline ur-cinematic logic: “One could even say that it dramatizes the light itself.” On the thin line between emancipation and control, stimulus and trauma, the strobe summarizes the modern onslaught on the nervous system with instantly changing signals. In the 1950s, flicker technologies were used for electroencephalographic research documenting how changes in the electrical rhythms of the brain have diagnostic value. In the nerve-brain click-regime of our digital era such stimuli have plenty of exchange value, too.

    “Writing in strobe” can invent “crazy speeds…where different themes connect up, and words form various figures according to the precipitous speeds of reading and association,” as Gilles Deleuze said about Hélène Cixous’ way of writing her way out of patriarchal regimes. In Fahrenholz, the icy strobe is no less of a poetics, a suitable aesthetic for our dreamless time. Departing from acceleration and Cixous’ call for “more body”, Fahrenholz instead presents meditations on the dissolution of normality and on caesuras in social time and space. Known rhythms of life begin to limp and falter as we are served up a new diet of (dis)embodiment, separation and togetherness, in the affective interstices between bodies and technologies. Maybe somewhere here, in a big blank space-time like the Tempelhofer Feld during the pandemic, we can find a way to acknowledge what happens – or what does not happen – as an event to be handed over to the future, so time can branch out into something new.

    Lars Bang Larsen

    This exhibition was curated by Nikola Dietrich.

    Loretta Fahrenholz, 2021/22. Courtesy: the artist and Galerie Buchholz.

  • Exhibition: Pure Fiction - Shifting Theatre: Sibyl’s Mouths, 12.2. – 6.3.2022
    Shifting Theatre: Sibyl's Mouths, 2022. Image by Aislinn McNamara.

    Pure Fiction: Rosa Aiello (in collaboration with Dylan Aiello), Ellen Yeon Kim, Erika Landström, Luzie Meyer, Mark von Schlegell
    Shifting Theatre: Sibyl’s Mouths

    An Exhibition at the End of Performance

    Opening: Friday, February 11, 2022, 5 – 9 pm

    Performances from 7 pm

    Closing: Sunday, March 6, 2022, 11 am – 6 pm
    Performances from 2 pm

    The 2G rule applies. No registration required.


    In the Sibylline cave near today’s Naples, the narrator of Mary Shelley’s 1826 novel The Last Man finds a collection of prophecies scribbled on scattered oak leaves. These fragments conjure the story of an epidemic that ravages the globe in the 2100’s, forever altering human history. Arguably the first science-fiction apocalypse, The Last Man touches on themes such as solitude, new forms of intimacy, repetition, and life on the edge of an epoch.

    In Shifting Theatre: Sibyl’s Mouths, members of the writing and performance group Pure Fiction—Rosa Aiello, Ellen Yeon Kim, Erika Landström, Luzie Meyer, and Mark von Schlegell—respond to the unpredictable cultural landscape of today by staging this strikingly relevant novel’s motifs in a shifting theatre of sound, installation, lecture, film and puppetry. Voices animate and prophesize; make presence out of absent figures and forces; translate from symbol to action and back.

    In a time when coming together physically as a group seems near impossible; coming apart together is newly significant. Like the fragmentary prophecies of the Sibylline cave, works made specifically for the exhibition come to life at various stages, and in accordance with their own internal script and time-line. Through a careful interrogation to the where and who, their individual unfoldings seem to ask in discordant chorus: what is performance?

    On the Kölnischer Kunstverein’s ground floor, a sound installation by Ellen Yeon Kim repeats while physically sprawling across the premises. Luzie Meyer’s new video work is accompanied by marionettes of the current Pure Fiction members, and in REAL BOOKS—a temporary book store of no set time or space—Mark von Schlegell offers the written word as time machine, for a price.

    In the adjacent cinema, Rosa Aiello (in collaboration with Dylan Aiello) entangles herself in sibling ribaldry and the libidinal potentials of performance (on and off screen). Meanwhile, in the former broadcasting room on the second floor, Erika Landström stages a dream machine of cognitive labour and space exploration.

    With live performances on opening night and closing day.

    The exhibition was curated by Nikola Dietrich.



    Rosa Aiello (*1987, Canada) is an artist, writer, and filmmaker. Her works have been shown at various institutions and galleries, including Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt am Main; Cell Project Space, London; Bureau des Réalités, Brussels; and Stadtgalerie Bern, among others. She has had recent solo exhibitions at DREI, Cologne; Arcadia Missa, London; Lodos, Mexico City, and Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge. Her writing has been published in Triple Canopy, Starship, CanadianArt, Art Papers, Public Journal, and F. R. David.

    Ellen Yeon Kim (*1985, South Korea) studied at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main in the class of Peter Fischli and Simon Starling, and graduated from Slade School of Art, UCL. Her aesthetically complex work unveils the absurdity of the multiple irreconcilable expectations which are placed on individuals by society and its institutions. It reveals ways in which trauma is passed on and perpetuated by individuals themselves. Kim’s practice involves various media, including theatre, stand-up comedy, installations and drawings. She was awarded The Peter Mertes Stipendium in 2021 and has been part of the studio program at the Kölnischer Kunstverein since 2019. 

    Erika Landström (*1984, Sweden) is an artist working in sculpture, installation and performance. She is a graduate from the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main, and the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program in New York. Her most recent performance Holders premiered at the Emily Harvey Foundation in New York, 2020. She has been published by Sternberg Press and Texte Zur Kunst, among others, and her writing ranges from poetry to art criticism. Her work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions internationally.

    Luzie Meyer (*1990, Germany) is an artist, poet, musician, and translator based in Berlin. She studied Philosophy at Goethe University Frankfurt and graduated in Fine Arts from Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main in 2016. Her work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions internationally. She was awarded the studio residency of the Hessische Kulturstiftung at the Cité internationale des arts, Paris in 2018. She has received a pre-doctoral fellowship of the DiGiTal fund Berlin in 2020, as well as a research grant from the Berlin senate in 2021 for her research project “Unthinking Metatheatre”. 

    Mark von Schlegell (*1967, USA) is a novelist, critic and artist, Cologne-based since 2005. His first novel Venusia (2005) was honor’s listed for the Otherwise Prize in science fiction. In English he is published by Semiotext(e) and Sternberg Press; in German by Matthes und Seitz and Merve Verlag. His visual art has been shown in the US (New York), South Korea (Seoul), Denmark, and throughout Germany. A founding member of the Pure Fiction collective since 2011, he has taught art and literature at CalArts in Valencia, the San Francisco Art Institute, and Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main.

    Shifting Theatre: Sibyl’s Mouths, 2022. Image by Aislinn McNamara.

    Supported by:

    Dieses Bild hat ein leeres Alt-Attribut. Der Dateiname ist KKV_PF_Logoleiste_Web_220120-1024x384.png
2021
  • Exhibition: Exhibition closed, 24.12.2021 – 3.1.2022
    Daniela Ortiz: The children are not of the wolf, 2021. Installation view Kölnischer Kunstverein, 2021. Courtesy: the artist and àngels, barcelona. Photo: Mareike Tocha.

    The exhibition Daniela Ortiz – Nurtured by the defeat of the colonizers our seeds will raise will be closed from 24 December 2021 to 03 January 2022.

    We look forward to welcoming you back on 4 January 2022.

    For your visit to the exhibition, please also refer to the current information.

  • Exhibition: Jahresgaben 2021, 8. – 19.12.2021
    Jahresgaben 2021, Kölnischer Kunstverein.

    Artists:
    Naama Arad, Inessa Emmer, Sabrina Fritsch, Stefani Glauber, Selma Gültoprak, Melike Kara, Ellen Yeon Kim, Rory Pilgrim, Nora Schultz, Cally Spooner, Katja Tönnissen, Mark von Schlegell

    We are pleased to present to you this year’s Jahresgaben at the Kölnischer Kunstverein from December 8 to 19, 2021 during the regular opening hours and cordially invite you to a tour with the director Nikola Dietrich on Thursday, December 9 at 5 pm. Registration and presentation of a 2G certificate are required. Please note our information regarding your visit to our exhibitions and events.

    Some of the young and established regional and international artists who are supporting the Kölnischer Kunstverein this year with an edition were represented in the 2021 annual program, are current studio fellows, or are connected to the Kunstverein in some other way.

    Please find information about the artists and the available works under Latest Jahresgaben

    Orders for the Jahresgaben 2021 can be submitted in written from that date up to and including December 19. If more orders are received than there are copies available, the decision will be made by lot. The lottery will take place on December 20, 2021. After the draw, all interested parties will be notified in writing of the result. All remaining Jahresgaben are still for sale after the lottery and can be purchased at any time. Purchase only by members.

  • Solo Exhibition: Melike Kara – Nothing is Yours, Everything Is You, 13.11. – 5.12.2021
    Melike Kara, Kölnischer Kunstverein, 2021.

    Opening of the exhibition: Friday, 12.11.2021, 5 – 9 pm

    Under the title Nothing is Yours, Everything Is You, Melike Kara presents new paintings in a site-specific installation made of photographs from her personal archive, which gathers family pictures as well as other sources. It serves as an unofficial historical documentation of the Kurdish diaspora that has neither the means nor the resources to preserve their own history. The bleach-treated and faded wallpaper in the Kölnischer Kunstverein’s studio captures rituals and traditions, memories and narratives passed down from generation to generation, resisting oblivion. 

    Her paintings, on view as a triptych outdoors, are gestural-abstract compositions of hybrid forms and figures and borrow from the formal language of textile products of Kurdish tribes, including a special carpet-knotting technique. Kara interweaves the history of Western painting with influences from indigenous cultures and overcomes the outdated strict categorization of art and craft.

    In conjunction with the exhibition, a presentation of the publication WHERE WE MEET, 2021 (Exhibit. Cat. Jan Kaps, Wiels Brussels, ed. Fabian Schöneich, graphics: Anne Stock, 83 pages) with film screenings, installation, and an introduction by Fabian Schöneich will take place on Thursday, November 18, 2021 at 6 pm.

    The exhibition was curated by Nikola Dietrich.

    Melike Kara (*1985 in Bensberg, lives in Cologne) has had solo exhibitions at LC Queisser in Tbilisi (2021), Jan Kaps in Cologne (2020), Arcadia Missa in London, Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam (both 2019), Yuz Museum in Shanghai (2018), and group exhibitions at Ludwig Forum in Aachen, Belgrade Biennale (both 2021), Wiels in Brussels, and blank projects in Cape Town (both 2020), among others.

    Supported by:

  • Solo Exhibition: Daniela Ortiz - Nurtured by the defeat of the colonizers our seeds will raise, 13.11.2021 – 30.1.2022
    Daniela Ortiz, Kölnischer Kunstverein, 2021.

    Opening of the exhibition: Friday, 12.11.2021, 5 – 9 pm

    In paintings, textile works, children’s books and installations, Daniela Ortiz develops anti-racist and anti-colonial narratives as counterpart to colonialisms that persist to this day. She confronts those players and power holders responsible for the institutional and structural racism that manifests itself, among other things, in the abusive and human rights-violating control of immigration and borders. The focus on craft media in Ortiz’s artistic practice stems from her increasing interest in shifting away from the aesthetics of Eurocentric conceptual art.

    The presentation at Kölnischer Kunstverein is the first institutional solo exhibition of Daniela Ortiz in Germany and, under the title Nurtured by the defeat of the colonizers our seeds will raise, shows new, context-specific series of works together with existing works. The exhibition is accompanied by the artist book The Rebellion of the Roots, 2021 (ed. Kölnischer Kunstverein, graphics: Ronnie Fueglister with Yves Graber, 80 pages), which is available for the opening of the exhibition.

    The exhibition was curated by Nikola Dietrich.

    Daniela Ortiz’ (*1985 in Cusco, lives in Urubamba, Perú) works have been shown internationally in solo exhibitions including La Virreina. Centre de la Imatge in Barcelona (2019), Las Ataranzas in Valencia, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art in Middlesbrough (both 2017), Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven (2016), àngels barcelona in Barcelona (2014), as well as in group exhibitions at LUM – Lugar de la Memoria in Lima, KADIST art foundation in Paris, neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst (nGbK) in Berlin, Kunsthalle Wien in Vienna (all 2021), and Kunstverein Hamburg (2020).


    Supported by:


  • Exhibition: Guilty Curtain, 21.8. – 24.10.2021
    Ursula Burghardt: Ohne Titel (Reitstiefel), 1968, Photo: Stiftung Kunstfonds, (c) Nachlass Ursula Burghardt.

    Artists: Etti Abergel, Naama Arad and Tchelet Ram, Julie Becker, Ursula Burghardt, Noa Glazer, Omer Halperin, Gizela Mickiewicz, Oren Pinhassi, Michal Samama, Nora Schultz, Noa Schwartz, Lior Shachar

    Opening: Friday, 20.8.2021, 3 pm – 9 pm

    Guilty Curtain is a site-specific installation made for the historical space of the Kölnischer Kunstverein. Inside the long transparent exhibition hall, a group show will take the form of a glass house. The artworks on display all rely on surrealistic notions like covering and/or replacing. These gestures, performed by artists on various objects and materials, do not end at a cul de sac. The wrapping of a toaster oven in sheep’s wool uncovers an entangled relationship – instead of the sheep being placed in the oven, the oven is devoured by the sheep. This mixture of material, words and categories alludes to a symbiotic relationship between the body and the object. While the modernist attempt to dissolve separations between inside and outside only ended up emphasizing the divide, what is disclosed through the collection of all these bodily objects undermines the architectural structure of the Kunstverein itself; as one will experience space, in this particular glass house nature is no longer an exterior.

    The extensive group exhibition and event series brings together artists mainly from Israel with others from Poland, Germany, and the USA. In close cooperation with the Israeli artist and curator Naama Arad, a local and active art scene, which has formed mainly in Tel Aviv, will be presented at the Kölnischer Kunstverein in Cologne.

    Curated by Naama Arad and Nikola Dietrich


    Please note the information regarding your visit to the exhibition according to the Corona Protection Ordinance.


    The exhibition is sponsored by:


    With further support from:

  • Exhibition: reboot: responsiveness, 12.5.2021 – 8.6.2022
    reboot:, 2021.

    reboot: responsiveness is the first cycle of reboot: – a collaborative, multi-cycle, anti-racist and queer-feminist dialogue encompassing performance and research based practices, jointly presented by Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne and Ludwig Forum für internationale Kunst, Aachen.

    reboot:
    Conceived by Eva Birkenstock, Nikola Dietrich, and Viktor Neumann
    Core Collective: Alex Baczynski-Jenkins, Gürsoy Doğtaş, Klara Lidén, Ewa Majewska, Rory Pilgrim, Cally Spooner, and Mariana Valencia
    Graphic design by Sean Yendrys


    Further information under the following link. All previous events can be viewed in the archive. Upcoming dates will be announced via our calendar.


    reboot: responsiveness is a cooperation of:



    reboot: responsiveness is supported by:

  • Solo Exhibition: Genoveva Filipovic – Seufzer, 27.3. – 4.7.2021

    We are pleased to welcome you back. The exhibition is prolonged until July 4, 2021. Please note to the current applicable corona protection measures.

    At the time of writing this text, it cannot be assumed that visitors will be able to enter the Kölnischer Kunstverein, Die Brücke, in the near future and that the exhibition Bridge of Sigh will find any audience at all. Genoveva Filipovic’s exhibition will possibly be seen only from outside.

    “…If some ill luck forced him to speak, he managed to say only the most ridiculous things. Worse yet, he saw how absurdly he was behaving, and then exaggerated it still further; but what he did not see was the expression in his eyes; they were so beautiful and revealed such a fervent soul that, just as a good actor does, they gave charming significance to words that had none… he never said anything worth saying except when, distracted by some unforeseen event, he wasn’t trying to turn a well-phrased compliment.”
    Stendhal, The Red and the Black

    Concept
    I made cactuses and placed them in a row. 
    After this work was completed, I changed the facial expression of each cactus so that, I thought, it might elicit a sigh.
    When that proved too difficult, I did this: I claimed that I was changing the facial expression of each cactus so that, I thought, it might elicit a sigh. But I inserted smiles instead.

    Then I try to imagine how it would be to ‘act out’ this scene.

    Very Ralph 
    The Artist wants no Erklärungsbrücken

    The exhibition was curated by Nikola Dietrich.

    Genoveva Filipovic (*1986 in Frankfurt am Main) lives in New York and currently in Cologne. She studied at the HfG in Offenbach am Main and at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste – Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main (until 2013). Her works have recently been shown at Galleria Federico Vavassori in Milan (2019), Kunsthalle Zurich (2019), Goton in Paris (2018), Dead Ends in New York (2016), Vilma Gold in London (2016), and Neue Alte Brücke in Frankfurt am Main (2014).

    The exhibition is supported by:

2020
  • Exhibition: Jahresgaben 2020, 17.11.2020 – 31.1.2021
    Lena Anouk Philipp: Ums Mark kreisen 2017.

    We are pleased to present the Jahresgaben 2020 (annual editions) online for now starting Tuesday, November 17. Works by both young and established artists exclusively produced or donated for the Kunstverein are available: 

    John Baldessari, Kenneth Bergfeld, Tom Burr, Hanne Darboven, Dunja Herzog, Dorothy Iannone, Emma LaMorte, Marcel Odenbach, Lena Anouk Philipp, Luc Tuymans, Jeff Wall 

    By purchasing a Jahresgabe, you are making an important contribution to the support of contemporary art and artists and to the work of the Kölnischer Kunstverein. Thank you very much!

    Orders for the 2020 Jahresgaben can be placed in writing from November 17, 2020 up to and including January 6, 2021. If more orders are received than copies are available, the decision will be made by lot. The lottery will take place on January 7, 2021.
    Please note that the Jahresgaben can only be purchased by members of the Kölnischer Kunstverein. The complete ordering procedure can be found here.

    Currently and until January 31, 2021, the Kölnischer Kunstverein will remain closed according to the Corona Protection Regulation of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia. As soon as we can open our doors again for visitors, the Jahresgaben will be on display in an exhibition on the 2nd floor. 

    We will keep you updated with news about the reopening and our program via our website and newsletter.

    We look forward to seeing you soon again!

    Lena Anouk Philipp: Ums Mark kreisen 2017.
    Jahresgaben 2020, Kölnischer Kunstverein.

  • Exhibition: THE KÖLN CONCERT – Dorothy Iannone & Juliette Blightman, 31.10.2020 – 7.3.2021
    Dorothy Iannone: (Ta)Rot Pack, 2016, Double-sided laser copies mounted on cardboard, from 54 original drawings from 1968/69. 27 × (26,5 × 20 cm). Courtesy Air de Paris, Romainville. // Juliette Blightman: Stages of Seed Development, 2020, pencil on paper, photographic print, gouache, 28 × (27,4 × 20,8 cm). Courtesy Juliette Blightman and Arcadia Missa, London.

    Opening on Friday, 30.10.2020, 3 pm – 9 pm

    ‘Image higher than angels: The Köln Concert’
    A text by Amelia Stein


    Life has no outside, say the psyche-celestial Ladies of Liberty with their microphones, say the fulgent cacti fountains, says the blooming pussy flower with an unmistakable wink. 
     
    This is the pact The Köln Concert stages with its audience, among its works, between its artists, Juliette Blightman (*1980) and Dorothy Iannone (*1933), who draw down time into all-encompassing symbologies of love, sex, care, work, autonomy, joy and other selfhoods. When I say symbol, I mean images that speak broadly and concentrate personally, that are partly mnemonic and partly divinatory, in which breakfast lives alongside Art Nouveau and narrative takes the place of noses. In The Köln Concert, forms, figures, messages layer in counterpoint, a leitmotif of sorts, the coexistence of harmony and clash played by Blightman and Iannone so that they too may listen. 
     
    Not that everything is practice but that practice reticulates: Blightman made the fountains in her stepfather’s garage, perhaps with her young daughter’s help. It is possible to imagine their visit to the hardware store to select the paint, a lurid yet somehow utilitarian green. Here in the world of handy things, also misappropriation, high jinks, making do, the phalluses’ gentle eruptions rely on whatever energy they can gather via solar panels; when stilled, they earnestly hold court as choruses performing in the rounds of paddling pools. Something’s always growing, which is to say requiring tending, in Blightman’s work. Children and plants, but also limitations, perspective, desire, sense of self: care is a matter of patterning, of understanding subject and process as one and the same. ‘Daughter’ is a process; so is ‘body’, so is ‘home’. The pencil and guache works in Stages of Seed Development (2020) appear at first as windows until their serialized arrangement suggests something more vociferous, perhaps phrases, at once contingent and complete.  
     
    These works in particular speak, sing, move to their muse, (Ta)Rot Pack (2016/1968-69), Iannone’s ecstatic allegory of her life with Dieter Roth, which offers some phrases of its own: ‘This Card Brings a Brief Respite Maybe’, says a nude Roth wandering a trippy Swiss path; ‘This Card Brings What Everyone Wants’, say the adorned lovers in tantric embrace. Iannone has said that this ability—to bring things—is the only way her cards reflect the (other) tarot. I would venture another: that the (Ta)Rot Pack, like Blightman’s Stages, celebrates a sense of everyday consequence that is not without a cosmic sense of humor. 

    Which may have something to do with itinerancy, an underlying cadence here. These works spring from places both loved and abided, and from the need amid frequent departures to sometimes return—to the United States, for instance, where Iannone and her Ladies of Liberty were born, to Germany, where Blightman first raised, and first painted, her daughter, and to the Rhineland specifically, where Iannone lived with Roth and began the (Ta)Rot Pack in the late 1960s. Image is how to get there: The Story Of Bern (Or) Showing Colors (1970), originally an artist book, shown in The Köln Concert as a diaporama, tells that highly generative periods are often live with contention and struggle. And that at the end of it all, when we finally surface, we can know only through reflection that the triumphal arc stands somewhere in the distance. 

    The exhibition was curated by Nikola Dietrich.

    In the course of the exhibition, a joint publication will be produced.  

    The presentation at the Kölnischer Kunstverein is a continuation of the exhibition Prologue at Arcadia Missa Gallery this year. A second version of the exhibition will open at Vleeshal in Middelburg, The Netherlands, in April 2021.

    Thanks to: Air de Paris, Romainville; Arcadia Missa, London; Peres Projects, Berlin; Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin; Galerie Fons Welters, Amsterdam; Collection  Alexander Schröder, Berlin; Roger Hobbs; Kentaurus, Cologne

    The exhibition is supported by:

  • Solo Exhibition: Dunja Herzog – Meanwhile, 5.9. – 18.10.2020
    Dunja Herzog, 2020, Foto: André Fuchs.

    With the solo exhibition Meanwhile by Dunja Herzog, the Kölnischer Kunstverein is realizing a comprehensive exhibition of the artist’s work, accompanied by a program of film screenings, artist talks, performance, children’s workshop and a guided tour of the Cologne-based Women’s History Society. Various elements and themes of different temporalities and backgrounds are brought together in a site-specific installation in which they coexist and relate to one another.

    The exhibition is a continuation of the examination of the history of the copper trade, as it is dealt with by the artist in particular in the project Red Gold and its focus on the omnipresent systematic exploitation of the global capitalist project, furthering the investigation with new work produced for the exhibition. In doing so, she looks back to the more distant past: to the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age, to the history of witch-hunting and copper production in Europe (e.g. by reproducing a 16th century woodcut by Georg Agricola depicting mines for copper mining, as well as a witches’ dance on the Blocksberg in the Harz Mountains). Alongside these are references to mechanisms of commercial profit in order to visualize today’s globally operating economic systems, and considerations of the role of women and reproduction in the transition to capitalism. Her personal background as a Swiss woman is essential in this context. Women’s voting rights in Switzerland, one of the last European countries to institute such rights, only became effective in 1971 (in the canton of Appenzell even only from 1990); another aspect is Switzerland’s role in the system of imperial exploitation.

    Not least of all, the material copper is one of the most important global economic indicators with its main trading center in Switzerland since 2011; the five largest Swiss companies are active in raw materials trading. In a new video work by the artist, a geographic and temporal arc is drawn from the Copperbelt in Zambia (a region with the most important copper mining area in Africa, where the Swiss company Glencore also operates mines) to a copper mine in the Harz Mountains, where the largest copper deposit in Germany once existed. At a depth of 165 meters, a film has been produced in Harz, showing the ceiling of a tunnel illuminated by light whilst driving out of the mine—a retreat from the mine and the overexploitation of both nature and labor that was once practiced there. For the artist, questions of resources, mining, exploitation and trade are central: How did it come about that cultural history in Europe transitioned from a reverence for nature, to its exploitation, and then, in the “logic of exploitation”, was exported from Europe to the whole world?

    A world where violence, foreign domination and profit prevail and our relationship to the earth, or how it is used and abused, is seen by the artist as synonymous with how bodies and their emotional “landscapes” are dealt with. The more resources, including copper—without which our contemporary digital world is inconceivable—are mined, the more the search for or connection to inner resources seems relevant.

    These various themes and their associated stories, which almost always speak of violence, are not necessarily addressed directly in the exhibition or reproduced. Rather, they are kept present through the materials enlisted, by relating to their origin, their use, their historical relevance, their development and the trade routes that have shaped our society very physically over time. Thus, for the exhibition, baskets made of copper wire from electronic scrap have been created in collaboration with basket makers from the Republic of Benin in Lagos, a city that belongs to one of the largest electronic dumping sites in West Africa; not only to detach the material from one value chain and transpose it into another, but to simultaneously pay homage to the women of Nigeria and Zambia, who made significant contributions to the independence of both countries. These colonial legacies seem particularly relevant to the building of the Kölnischer Kunstverein itself, since it was the seat of the British Council – the so called “Die Brücke” (The Bridge)—in the enduring colonial period of the British, and its proposition of a “bridge” to the world after the Second World War.

    The artist creates a space, in a certain sense a “third space”, in which a larger spectrum of stories and their complex interrelations with matter, material and their transformation and relationship to people can be experienced, and other perspectives made possible. From the materials and plants that are addressed, she extracts, in a way, the essence of their inherent energies and logics, makes them physically perceptible and thus ultimately also calls upon their nourishing properties.

    The two editions Sea field and Death of Nature will be published on the occasion of this exhibition.

    Dunja Herzog (*1976 in Basel, Switzerland) lived last year in Lagos, Nigeria, where she created some of the work presented at the Kölnischer Kunstverein. Her works were shown at the Kunstverein Göttingen; Swiss Art Awards, Basel (both 2018); Lagos Biennale, Lagos, Nigeria (2017); BLOK art space, Istanbul; 1646, Den Haag (all 2016); New Bretagne / Belle Air, Essen and at MAXXI Museum, Rome (both 2015), among others.

    The exhibition was curated by Nikola Dietrich.

    With kindly support of:


  • Solo Exhibition: Emma LaMorte – Aussicht, 5.9. – 18.10.2020
    Emma LaMorte, 2020.

    In her first institutional solo exhibition, Emma LaMorte takes on the architecture of the Kölnischer Kunstverein: With her textile works, performances, texts and installations, she reacts to given spaces and architectural structures in order to supplement, alienate or conceal them. In the Studio, a project room with an atrium on the second floor of the building, the artist produces an expansive quilted and sewn textile work. In reference to the location, she recreates elements of the real exterior space, integrates them into a fictional landscape backdrop and creates an inversion of inside and outside.

    The four-part work series consisting of a total of eleven panels shows a rocky sea coast and a pastoral scene at four different times of day, varying in lighting mood and colour. Her motifs are based on a fascination for gothic, fantasy, kitsch, fetish, and nature romanticism. The series of works Aussicht (2020) dispenses with the figurative in favour of an allegorical landscape depiction in which the position of the viewer is that of a 360 degree perspective on an observation tower. The preoccupation with the view—the yearning look outside into the distance or the future—is a recurring subject in fine art and literature, especially at the time of German Romanticism, and immediately evokes the visual world of Caspar David Friedrichs.

    The collages on stretcher frames borrowed from patchwork elude a simple classification as “textile art”: due to the rough and improvised processing, the variety of form language, haptics, and motifs as well as the nostalgic aesthetics appear exceptionally space- and timeless and are located in a dichotomy between absolute present and historicity. At the same time, the textile material is part of a craft traditionally associated with women. In her examination of economic issues, Emma LaMorte examines historically shaped gender-specific divisions of labor (emotional labor, caretaking, domesticity, household, motherhood on the one hand, monetary labor, career, profiling and prestige on the other) as well as the discrepancy between their respective values and recognition in society. Both in her medial and content-related work on traditional, reactionary gender roles, the artist looks at the mechanisms of public and private space that consolidate and maintain them: patriarchal infrastructures, discriminating labor economies, structural sexism and violence.

    An artist book has been published in the context of the exhibition at the Kölnischer Kunstverein with texts by the artist Rosa Aiello and images of the exhibited works (graphic: Thomas Spallek). The text medium is an integral part of Emma LaMorte’s practice and expands the scenographic backdrop of improvised quilting techniques with narratives. The repetition of the wall panels can be found as a stylistic device in the texts of Aiello. The daily rhythm and sequence describe a domestic routine in which temporality is variably extended or shortened. Emma LaMorte questions how civilization and social structures are formed and shaped—and how they are destroyed again—and creates a vision of the future that can be promising or hopeless.

    The exhibition is accompanied by a public program consisting of a reading, a lecture performance, a children‘s workshop, a tarot workshop, and a radio show by various guests, among them the artists Rosa Aiello, Bitsy Knox, Benjamin Marvin, the author Jessa Crispin and the musician Laura Sparrow.

    Emma LaMorte (*1984 in Victoria B.C., Canada) lives and works in Berlin. She received a Master of Fine Arts at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, Sweden. Recent solo presentations of her work have been shown at Galleri Thomassen in Gothenburg (2020, together with Anders Johansson), Gärtnergasse in Vienna (2019, together with Benjamin Marvin), Stadium (2018) and Ashley (2017), both in Berlin, as well as in group exhibitions at Polansky in Prague (2019), Braunsfelder in Cologne (2018), Sm in Marseille (2018), Hotdock in Bratislava (2018), INDUSTRA in Brno (2018) and Decad in Berlin (2018).

    Curator: Miriam Bettin

    The exhibition is part of Canada’s cultural programme as Guest of Honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2020. It is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Government of Canada.

    With kindly support of:

  • Solo Exhibition: Tony Conrad, 15.2. – 12.7.2020
    Tony Conrad: Yellow TV, February 3, 1973, Courtesy: Tony Conrad Estate und Greene Naftali, New York

    Opening: Friday, February 14, 7 pm
    9 pm Film screening Tony Conrad “The Flicker”, 1966, 16mm film, b/w, 30 min

    Tony Conrad (1940-2016) is an experimental artist and a key figure for media artists such as Tony Oursler or Mike Kelley. As a violinist, he was one of the co-founders of Minimal Music and a pioneer of drone music, together with La Monte Young and John Cale. As a central figure of the avant-garde and with a career lasting over six decades, his work radiates beyond America. With this exhibition it will be presented to the European audience, in all its complexity, after his participation at documenta 5. With his first movie “The Flicker” (1966) he created an icon of structural film. His musical work—in composition, performances, and self-made musical instruments—is inevitably associated with his work as a visual artist.

    The Kölnischer Kunstverein is realizing the first large-scale exhibition, performance and music series in Germany honoring Tony Conrad’s artistic work. It succeeds a retrospective at the Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, and the MIT List Visual Arts Center and Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania (2018/19). As a central figure of the avant-garde, Conrad didn‘t only gain recognition for his contribution to minimalist music and structural film in the 1960s, due to his pioneering role as violinist. Instead he also set the tone for various cultural fields, including rock music and public television. Conrad’s first film, “The Flicker” (1966), a stroboscopic experiment well-known for his assault on the cinematic medium and the senses of his audience, soon led to the projects in which he treated film as sculptural and performative material. In “Sukiyaki Film” (1973) for example Conrad brought shortly fried film on the screen and in in his “Yellow Movies” from 1972/73 he painted paper surfaces with cheap paint and presented them as slowly changing films. He paved the way for drone music and influenced the founding of Velvet Underground. At the same time, Conrad was a combative critic of the media and their monitoring tools. In the eighties, his ambitious films about power relations in the army and in prisons critisized what he would call emerging culture of surveillance, control and containment. His collaborative programs, created for public television in the 1990s, made him an influential voice within society (as can be seen in the installation “Panopticon” from 1988 or “WiP”, with films by Tony Oursler and Mike Kelley, 2013). Conrad was a master of “crossover”, the bridging and connection of various disciplines, making it seem impossible to think about the interdependence between art, film, music, and performance in contemporary art without including him. He also was a passionate pedagogue—his 40 years as professor at the Media Department at the University of Buffalo provoked and inspired generations of students until today.

    The exhibition was curated by Nikola Dietrich.

    It is a collaboration between Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, and MAMCO, Geneva, and is based on the touring retrospective organized by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York (2018/19).

    The exhibition architecture at the Kölnischer Kunstverein was developed in cooperation with Milica Lopicic.

    The reusable wall system has been made possible by the Imhoff Stiftung.

    Weiterer Dank an Galerie Further thanks to Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New York and Greene Naftali, New York

2019
  • Exhibition: Jahresgaben 2019, 7. – 15.12.2019
    Jahresgaben 2019 at the Kölnischer Kunstverein

    Artists: Martin Assig, Olga Balema, Gerry Bibby, Juliette Blightman, Enrico David, Bradley Davies, Simon Denny, Ayşe Erkmen, Michael Krebber, Mischa Kuball, Puppies Puppies (Jade Kuriki Olivo), Morgaine Schäfer, Julia Scher, Gregor Schneider, Evelyn Taocheng Wang, Rachel Whiteread

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    Exhibition of the Jahresgaben: December 7 – 15, 2019
    Opening: Friday, December 6 2019, 7 pm

    We are pleased to present newly produced works for the Kunstverein together with earlier Jahresgaben, including unique pieces and limited editions. Many of the artist represented were recently participating in the group exhibition Maskulinitäten. A cooperation between Bonner Kunstverein, Kölnischer Kunstverein and Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf. Also part of this year’s Jahresgaben: Editions of the Salon Verlag to be acquired through the Kunstverein.

    Changed opening times during the Jahresgaben exhibition: open throughout Mon – Sun, 11 am – 6 pm, free of charge

  • Exhibition: Maskulinitäten. Eine Kooperation von Bonner Kunstverein, Kölnischem Kunstverein und Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf, 1.9. – 24.11.2019
    Maskulinitäten. Eine Kooperation von Bonner Kunstverein, Kölnischem Kunstverein und Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf, 2019

    Organised in collaboration by Bonner Kunstverein, Kölnischer Kunstverein and Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf, Maskulinitäten is an international exhibition with a series of events and accompanying publication project that explores the subject of masculinity via contemporary art. The tripartite presentation is premised by an interest in questioning how a feminist exhibition on masculinity could look.

    Conceived within the context of prominent and reactionary manifestations of masculinity and with an irreverent, uncompromising critique of its hegemonic forms, the collaboration aims to destabilise patriarchal and heteronormative notions of gender. Including public artworks, performances, plays, readings, lectures, screenings, and workshops, the exhibition seeks to open up alternative spaces of agency and bring performative and transgressive conceptions of identity, sexuality, gender and the body to the fore.

    The three institutions share a history in variously presenting radical, feminist and queer exhibitions. Whilst many of these focused on reclaiming femininity and female experience from a history of male authorship, this project turns its attention instead to the male subject. The exhibition and the accompanying programme explores shifting perspectives on the representation of the body, the associated politics of power and visibility, and how these are negotiated and deconstructed in art from the 1960s to the present. Encompassing artistic and art-theoretical perspectives from different contexts and periods, masculinity is encountered as a complex, evolving, social construct that remains in continual flux.

    Curated by Eva Birkenstock, Michelle Cotton and Nikola Dietrich


    Artists in the exhibition
    Vito Acconci, The Agency, Georgia Anderson & David Doherty & Morag Keil & Henry Stringer, Lutz Bacher, Louis Backhouse, Olga Balema, Lynda Benglis, Judith Bernstein, Gerry Bibby, Alexandra Bircken, Juliette Blightman, Patricia L. Boyd, Anders Clausen, Keren Cytter, Enrico David, Vaginal Davis, Jonathas de Andrade, Jimmy DeSana, Nicole Eisenman, Hedi El Kholti, Jana Euler, Hal Fischer, Andrea Fraser, keyon gaskin with Samiya Bashir, sidony o‘neal and Adee Roberson, Eunice Golden, Philipp Gufler, Richard Hawkins, Jenny Holzer, Hudinilson Jr., Allison Katz, Annette Kennerley, Sister Corita Kent, Mahmoud Khaled, Jürgen Klauke, Jutta Koether, Tetsumi Kudo, Klara Lidén, Hilary Lloyd, Sarah Lucas, Robert Morris, Shahryar Nashat, D’Ette Nogle, Henrik Olesen, D.A. Pennebaker & Chris Hegedus, Josephine Pryde, Puppies Puppies (Jade Kuriki Olivo), Carol Rama, Lorenzo Sandoval, Julia Scher, Agnes Scherer, Bea Schlingelhoff, Heji Shin, Katharina Sieverding, Nancy Spero, Anita Steckel, Evelyn Taocheng Wang, Carrie Mae Weems, Marianne Wex, Martin Wong, Katharina Wulff


    Bonner Kunstverein
    Lynda Benglis, Judith Bernstein, Alexandra Bircken, Patrica L. Boyd, Jana Euler, Hal Fischer, Eunice Golden, Richard Hawkins, Jenny Holzer, Hudinilson Jr., Allison Katz, Mahmoud Khaled, Hilary Lloyd, Sarah Lucas, Robert Morris, D’Ette Nogle, Puppies Puppies (Jade Kuriki Olivo), Bea Schlingelhoff, Anita Steckel

    curated by Michelle Cotton


    Kölnischer Kunstverei
    Georgia Anderson & David Doherty & Morag Keil & Henry Stringer, Louis Backhouse, Olga Balema, Gerry Bibby, Juliette Blightman, Anders Clausen, Enrico David, Jonathas de Andrade, Jimmy DeSana, Jenny Holzer, Hedi El Kholti, Hilary Lloyd, Sarah Lucas, Shahryar Nashat, Puppies Puppies (Jade Kuriki Olivo), Carol Rama, Bea Schlingelhoff, Heji Shin, Evelyn Taocheng Wang, Carrie Mae Weems, Marianne Wex, Martin Wong, Katharina Wulff

    curated by Nikola Dietrich


    Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf
    Vito Acconci, The Agency, Keren Cytter, Vaginal Davis, Nicole Eisenman, Andrea Fraser, keyon gaskin mit Samiya Bashir, sidony o´neal und Adee Roberson, Philipp Gufler, Jenny Holzer, Annette Kennerley, Sister Corita Kent, Jürgen Klauke, Jutta Koether, Tetsumi Kudo, Klara Lidén, Henrik Olesen, D.A. Pennebaker & Chris Hegedus, Josephine Pryde, Puppies Puppies (Jade Kuriki Olivio), Lorenzo Sandoval, Julia Scher, Agnes Scherer, Bea Schlingelhoff, Katharina Sieverding, Nancy Spero, Evelyn Taocheng Wang

    curated by Eva Birkenstock


    Program during the opening weekend:

    Opening on Saturday, August 31, 2019

    2.30 pm Bonner Kunstverein
    5 pm Kölnischen Kunstverein
    7.30 pm Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf

    Saturday, 31 August
    Legal Gender, Performance conceived by Anita Steckel
    from 2.30 pm, Bonner Kunstverein

    Parallel Lines, Performance by Gerry Bibby with Ellen Yeon Kim
    from 5 pm, Kölnischer Kunstverein

    Naked Self (Transitioning) (21 Months On Hormone Replacement Therapy), Nude Performance by Puppies Puppies (Jade Kuriki Olivo)
    5.30 – 6.30 pm, Kölnischer Kunstverein
    8 – 9 pm, Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf

    Sunday, 1 September
    Tectonic Mnemonic, a platform with readings with guests, invited by Gerry Bibby
    3 pm, Kölnischer Kunstverein

    With kind support of:

  • Solo Exhibition: Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda – The Auratic Narrative, 12.4. – 23.6.2019
    Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda, Untitled 2014

    Opening on April 11, 7 pm
    9 pm Moulting, a slideshow with the artists

    When organizing an exhibition surveying an artist’s body of work, the convention is to frame it as a story. Usually this story includes the artist’s birth (“Born in rural Romania”), a pivotal moment in their career (“She then moved to Paris, where she continued her philosophical pursuits at the Sorbonne”), and a period of striving towards artistic, cultural or political achievements (“these identities have informed his work for more than 30 years”i). These accounts of individual development, despite being factually accurate, are constructed, which is to say generated and maintained, by arts professionals. In an interview about the societal effects of quantitative metrics, sociologist Steffen Mau alludes to this practice, stating that “fictional expectations” for an artist are established “by means of a story, in the style of an auratic success story that will be realized in the future.” He continues:

    [In] the present-day artistic personality one looks for something that is still quite vague and speculative, but which in the future can determine whether he or she will attain a particular market position […] It’s a matter of the dynamic upward movement of a reputation, a positive vision. As always, telling this story requires the culture of experts, and thus professional critics, art marketers, or art educators and advisors.ii

    Mau’s assessment echoes the work of sociologist Olav Velthuis, whose book Talking Prices is a study of the principles used to set prices for contemporary art. According to Velthuis, narratives of an archetypal nature (e.g. tragedy, success story, Bildungsroman)—as opposed to economic laws such as supply and demand—determine art market prices, the subject of these stories being both individuals and developments occurring in the field as a whole. Like Mau, Velthuis emphasizes that these narratives are collectively told and reiterated by those working with art, while also stressing their imaginary character. He writes: “The issue here is not whether this narrative, or, for that matter, the ones that will follow, is true to historical reality or not. In fact, its truth content is questionable to say the least.”iii

    Such narratives contribute to the intangible quality of uniqueness and authenticity perceived in both artworks and artistic personalities, or “aura,” as literary critic Walter Benjamin termed it. The experience of this phenomenon, abstract and impalpable by definition, is laden with contradiction and ambiguity. For instance, it is commonly accepted, on one hand, that contemporary art is an entirely professionalized field in which the creation of art, as well as a wide scope of related occupational activities, is undertaken for the sake of achieving specific attendant outcomes. On the other, it is equally assumed, though rarely stated outright, that visions of an artist’s current or future significance may not yet, or ever be, realized (as indicated by the phrasing “fictional expectations”iv). Likewise, the distinctive qualities of an artist’s work and biography are referred to as the product of only a single individual, while it is seldom acknowledged that they are in fact bestowed upon the object or individual and as such are the collective expression of the shared beliefs, values, and lived experiences of art’s discursive community.

    The exhibition was curated by Nikola Dietrich.

    KKV-Logoleiste-JC-QTM-190314-LY

    The Auratic Narrative, an exhibition of works by Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda, is on view from April 12 to June 23, 2019.


    i All parenthetical quotations from exhibition descriptions as of March 2019 on the website of MoMA, Museum of Modern Art, New York, https://www.moma.org
    ii Steffen Mau and Uwe Vormbusch, “Likes and Performance / A conversation between Uwe Vormbusch and Steffen Mau on the quantification of the social.” Texte zur Kunst 110 (June 2018), https://www.textezurkunst.de/110/likes-and-performance
    iii Olav Velthuis, Talking Prices, Symbolic Meanings of Prices on the Market for Contemporary Art (Princeton University Press, 2005), 145.
    iv See also Jens Beckert, Imagined Futures: Fictional Expectations and Capitalist Dynamics (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2016), 93: “The fictionality of literary texts, furthermore, is openly communicated, whereas it is hidden in the case of fictional expectations.”


    With kind support of:

    Additional support from Gaga, Mexico City and Los Angeles; ESSEX STREET, New York; Galerie Francesca Pia, Zürich; Cabinet Gallery, London; Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin. We would also like to thank Andra Lauffs-Wegner for her support of the artists’ book Letters, published on the occasion of the exhibition.

    Further information will be regularly announced on the website and via our newsletter.


    Programme:

    April 11, 2019, 9 pm
    Moulting (2019), slideshow with Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda

    May 14, 2019, 11 am – 6 pm
    Moulting (2019), slideshow by Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda

    May 28, 2019, 7 pm
    Show and Tell # 1
    Scalalogia and The Wheel of Life (2019), Book Launch with Jasmin Werner and a lecture by Philipp Kleinmichel in conjunction with a concert by pogendroblem

    Show and Tell is an ongoing, autonomous series of events with shifting formats. Various guests are invited to participate, among these artists, writers, and musicians.

    June 6, 2019, 7 pm
    Letters (2019) and Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda x Teruo Nishiyama (2017), Double Book Launch with Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda

    June 19, 2019, 7 pm
    Screening of a film by the directors Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn

    Public guided tours on Thursdays

    April 25, 2019, 5 pm with Miriam Bettin
    May 23, 2019, 5 pm with Lukas Flygare (in English)
    June 6, 2019, 5 pm with Nikola Dietrich

    Public guided tours on Sundays

    May 19, 2019, 3 pm with Jasmin Werner
    June 23, 2019, 3 pm with Jasmin Werner

  • Solo Exhibition: Power of Print – The Work and Life of Bea Feitler, 16.2.2019 – 31.3.2020
    Bea Feitler, announcement for the exhibition Power of Print at the Kölnischer Kunstverein 2019

    Opening on February 15th, 7 pm

    Guided tours
    Wednesday, February 21st 5 pm: Guided tour through the exhibition with Juliane Duft
    Wednesday, March 7th, 5 pm: Guided tour through the exhibition with Nikola Dietrich
    Wednesday, March 21st, 5 pm: Guided tour through the exhibition with Miriam Bettin


    An exhibition in collaboration with Marte Eknæs and Nicolau Vergueiro

    Power of Print is a comprehensive survey of the revolutionary work, and life, of the late Brazilian art director and designer Bea Feitler (1938–1982).

    The exhibition features original magazines, books, video documentation and reproductions from Feitler’s meteoric career, spanning from the late 1950s until her death, and personal photos and artifacts that document her life and circle of friends, collaborators and peers. Best known for her work in Harper’s Bazaar, Ms., Rolling Stone and the modern Vanity Fair, Feitler left an indelible mark upon the face of American graphic design by offering a new approach to the magazine experience.

    Feitler’s expressive freedom, evidenced by shifting standards to a female gaze, allowed her to renegotiate the commercial representation of women and to use the magazine as a mass vehicle to address social issues through her vibrant aesthetic. Power of Print threads some of her work’s recurrent themes – the human silhouette, centerfold as compositional device, collaging, innovative use of typography, solarisation and duotone, through which she reimagined the relationship between body, text and graphic design in both layout and sensorial terms. “A magazine should flow. It should have rhythm. You can’t look at one page alone – you have to visualize what comes before and after.”

    Bea Feitler was born in Rio de Janeiro, after her Jewish parents fled Nazi Germany. She moved to New York to study at Parsons School of Design and briefly returned to Brazil in 1959 where she designed posters, covers and spreads for books and for the progressive literary magazine Senhor.

    In 1961 Feitler moved back to New York and shortly thereafter, at the age of 25, became the co-art director of Harper’s Bazaar with Ruth Ansel following the legacy of their mentors at the magazine Alexey Brodovitch and Marvin Israel. During their 10 years at the magazine, they shaped the emergence of a new feminist popular editorial language. Attuned to the political and cultural changes of the 1960s, they created some of the most iconic editorials of the decade. Feitler and Ansel were ahead of their time: in 1965, with Richard Avedon, they used the first black model in a shoot for a major magazine, and in the same year, also with Avedon, they won the ADC medal for the April ‘space helmet’ Harper’s Bazaar cover. At the magazine, Feitler forged tight relations with photographers that lasted throughout her career; Avedon, Bill King and Diane Arbus, among others, were in her tight circle of friends. Her role as a main connector of the scene is portrayed in Power of Print through a collection of original artwork, personal photographs, postcards and letters from collaborators and friends, also including Andy Warhol, Annie Leibovitz, Jacques-Henri Lartigue, Ray Johnson, Tomi Ungerer, Candy Darling and Gloria Steinem. Her natural collaborative approach elevated the commercial editorial to an art form.

    In 1972 Feitler joined Gloria Steinem to launch the feminist Ms. magazine. Here she created an experimental look using day-glo inks and mixtures of photography, illustration and typography compositions, activating the content of the magazine in both an accessible and critical way. Controversial messages were made more powerful through her masterful design, while feminist topics could enter into the mainstream. At Ms. Feitler had full control of visual content and a freedom that fueled her career. Today, the magazine is still pertinent and ahead of the curve and a hallmark of Feitler’s powerful, influential and unmistakable aesthetic.

    Between 1974 and 1980 Feitler designed seminal books, such as The Beatles, Henri-Jacques Lartigue’s The Diary of a Century, Helmut Newton’s White Women, Vogue: Book of Fashion Photography. Reflecting her belief that the modern book should be 50-50 in terms of visuals and words, she negotiated to receive cover credit and royalty along the authors and/or photographers of the books she designed. She also art directed ad campaigns for Calvin Klein, Halston, Max Factor, Diane Von Furstenberg etc., record covers, as for the iconic Rolling Stone album Black and Blue, and posters and costumes for the legendary Alvin Ailey dance company.

    In 1975, thanks to the insistence of Annie Leibovitz, Feitler started working for Rolling Stone, beginning her six-year association with the magazine which would lead her to redesigning its format twice. Feitler’s final project was the design of the premiere issue and overall concept of the revived Vanity Fair.

    The exhibition was curated by Nikola Dietrich.

    It has been made possible with the generous help of Bruno Feitler. An exhibition of Bea Feitler was also presented at Between Bridges in Berlin and UKS in Oslo, both in 2017, co-curated by Marte Eknæs and Nicolau Vergueiro. We would like to thank Between Bridges for their generous loans and Eugen Ivan Bergmann for his exhibition design contribution. Furthermore, we thank The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh for their loan and The New School Archives & Special Collections, New York, as well as the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, New York for providing additional material.

    Logoleiste-01

    With kind support of:

    Further information will be regularly announced on the website and via our newsletter.

2018
  • Exhibition: Cut-Up and Wolfgang Tillmans, 23.11. – 19.12.2018
    Motiv von Karl Holmqvist, 2018

    Opening on November 22nd, 7 pm

    Cut-Up is a four-week program of exhibitions, lectures, music, performance, screenings, and a magazine launch. Artists, musicians, writers, publishers and an international project space were all invited to transform the various spaces of the Kunstverein (exhibition halls, theaters, and studios) with a wide array of activities and diverse programming. Cut-Up is a method of collage imagined first by Brian Gysin and William S. Burroughs as a strategy that implements the cutting and re-arranging of text, images and sound as a means of liberating them of their (pre-)designated meanings and categories and (re-)assigning them to new systems of readings and understanding. The invited guests all have their own unique approaches to this kind of strategy. Together, this cacophony of mediums and tactics creates a unique kind of “living-structure” that privileges the dynamic over the static – one that is constantly changing, shifting and adapting according to its own conditions and needs. With this fluid structure of exhibitions and events, the Kunstverein becomes a site for a diversity of international and regional interactions that champion new avenues of engagement and collaboration.

    Together with the participants:
    Michael Amstad, Marie Angeletti, Bonnie Camplin, Eric D. Clark, Kerstin Cmelka, Marte Eknæs, Helene Hegemann, Karl Holmqvist, Ellen Yeon Kim, Mario Mentrup, Luzie Meyer, Johanna Odersky, Deborah Schamoni, Mark von Schlegell, Starship, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Nicolau Vergueiro, Adrian Williams

    Sorry I’m Late. XOXO Echo
    Upon the invitation of the Kunstverein, the formely Zurich-based exhibition space, Taylor Macklin, will organize an exhibition addressing the nature and possible interpretations of spaces and their conditions.
    With: Der Alltag (Sensationen des Gewöhnlichen), Andrea Büttner, Nicolas Buzzi, Brice Dellsperger, Maya Deren, Ayasha Guerin, Eva Meyer & Eran Schaerf, Carissa Rodriguez, Ben Rosenthal & Flavio Merlo, Li Tavor, Miriam Yammad, Constantina Zavitsanos

    Wolfgang Tillmans
    On the occasion of his 2018 Members Edition, Wolfgang Tillmans will build a Playback-Room in the studio space of the Kunstverein, giving visitors the unique possibility to sit and listen to his music under near-perfect conditions on the original vinyl pressing. The Members Editions itself stems from his on-going interest in music and became a special limited edition LP with a specially designed cover and sleeve. The recording is a “Kehrschaufel” (Dustbin)-Concert for the A-Side with a musical collage of edited radio-recordings from the 80s and 90s and the original song, “The Future is Unwritten” from 1985 on the B-Side. Tillmans conceived of the 3-part exhibition series Playback-Room at his non-profit space Between Bridges in 2014, the same year that the space opened at its new location in Berlin after having operated in London since 2006. In 2016, Playback-Room took up residency at the Lenbachhaus in Munich, and was re-animated again as part of his solo exhibition at London’s Tate Modern in 2017.

    Curated by Nikola Dietrich

    PROGRAM
    Thursday, Nov. 22nd

    7pm 
Opening of the exhibition with introduction by Nikola Dietrich

    Friday, Nov. 23rd
    3-5 pm
 Workshop with Ayasha Guerin

    7 pm 
Film screening with Rirkrit Tiravanija’s Karl’s Perfect Day, 2017, 94 min
    
with an Artists Talk and reading from Karl Holmqvist

    Friday, Nov. 30th
    7 pm
 Opening of the 2018 Member’s Edition Exhibition
    9 pm 
Mark von Schlegell and Ellen Yeon Kim, MUFA (Museum of Unfinished Art) Radio Play / Performance, 40 min

    Tuesday, December 4th, 2018, 7 pm
    Im Trailerpark der Angreifbaren: A Sideshow-Varieté to the film Die Angreifbaren (Release Anfang 2019)
    with Kerstin Cmelka & Mario Mentrup
    Guests: Rainer Knepperges and Sven Heuchert

    Friday, December 7th, 2018, 7 pm
    Lecture and filmcreening: Helene Hegemann & Deborah Schamoni

    Thursday, December 13th, 2018, 7 pm
    Filmscreenings:
    Marte Eknaes & Michael Amstad, A People Mover Evening
    & Artist Talk with Nikola Dietrich (in English)

    Sunday, December 16th, 2018, 7 pm
    Magazine launch: 20 years of Starship, Berlin, 18th edition
    Filmscreening and Talk with Bonnie Camplin;
    Record Release Musix’ lost its colour with Eric D.Clark

    Wednesday, December 19th, 2018, 7 pm
    Filmscreening: Luzie Meyer, The Flute, 2018
    Exhibition and Performance: Johanna Odersky,
    organised by Juliane Duft

    All events will be regularly announced on the website and via our newsletter.

    Graphic by Karl Holmqvist, 2018

  • Exhibition: Jahresgaben 2018, 22.11. – 19.12.2018

  • Solo Exhibition: Julien Ceccaldi – Solito, 8.9. – 11.11.2018
    Julien Ceccaldi, Solito, Kölnischer Kunstverein 2018

    Opening on Friday, September 7, 2018, 6 pm
    Reading from the comic Solito by Julien Ceccaldi (in Engl.), 9 pm
    followed by snacks und drinks in collaboration with Okey Dokey II

    Produced on site at the Kölnischer Kunstverein over the course of two months, Julien Ceccaldi’s Solito is a large-scale exhibition in which a fairy tale unfolds around a character of the same name, a concupiscent and boyish 30-year-old virgin willing to give himself to anybody. The plot is inspired by stories such as Beauty and the Beast, Bluebeard, and The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, in which the female protagonists end up in love with ugly men, and sexuality manifests itself through power and violence. However, all Solito gets out of his unsightly, quickly aborted love story, is a fading souvenir of happiness.
    Misery is all the more evident in the comic book published by Ceccaldi for this exhibition. In what could be interpreted as a dream of his own doing, the titular character goes so far as to make advances to death itself. He follows Oscar, a soldier from a magical land who is nothing more than “a cadaver, an empty shell [he] projects on” (J. Ceccaldi). Solito is presented as ambivalent: Desperate for partnership and security, he also acts masochistically in that he orchestrates a self-fulfilling destiny of being forever rejected. He plays with the dead like one does with dolls, and dreams of an eternal tea party with skeletons, all the while unconsciously wishing they would turn on him. Betraying their trust ultimately gets him thrown back onto the cold sidewalk of the real world – an allusion to The Little Match Girl by Hans-Christian Andersen, one of the most prominent fairy tale writers.
    Ceccaldi took descriptions of the author’s life as a template for Solito’s character traits. Andersen never engaged in sexual relations with women nor men, indulging in intense masturbation after each encounter instead. Described as childish and love-obsessed in equal measures, he was considered an outsider and a loner within the Copenhagen elite of the 19th century, and he died alone at the end of his days. His original tales were perverse and morbid; his suffering heroines often dying a painful death. Later adaptations of his more tragic stories have been rewritten with a happy ending.
    Further aesthetic and conceptual references can be found in the animation TV-series Revolutionary Girl Utena (1997) by Kunihiko Ikuhara, and the manga The Rose of Versailles (1972) and Oniisama E (1975) by Riyoko Ikeda, which weave together fairytale symbols, androgyny, and inescapable fates along with modern backdrops and contemporary preoccupations. The exhibition also borrows from these works the liberty to blend myths from different places across history from the Middle Ages, to 19th century Europe and our present time.
    These different starting points establish the framework for the figures and setting in Solito, which are transferred onto various surfaces both inside and outside the exhibition spaces: animated video loops, sculptures, digital drawings, and paintings on plastic. The works no longer follow a consistently linear narrative as on the pages of the book. Inspired by cel art, a technique used in animation to separate backgrounds from foregrounds, images of different moods manifest themselves through overlays, off-sets, and trompe l’œil effects. They circulate around the figure of Solito, with whom visitors get closer to as they walk through the exhibition hall. Like the fragmented pieces that come together to form identity itself, repeated variations of the same figure elicit feelings of vanity and confinement, but also moments of emancipatory liberation.

    The exhibition was curated by Nikola Dietrich.

    Julien Ceccaldi created the comic book Solito especially for the exhibition [36 pages, edited by Nikola Dietrich, September 2018]. It can be purchased at a price of €12 (members €8).

    Julien Ceccaldi was born in 1987 in Montreal, Canada and lives in New York. Solo exhibitions include Gay, Lomex, New York, NY (2017); and King and Slave, Jenny’s, Los Angeles, CA. He has recently participated in group exhibitions such as Painting Now and Forever 3, Greene Naftali, New York, NY; An Assembly of Shapes, Oakville Galleries, Ontario, Canada; and The Present in Drag, 9th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, Berlin.

    With kind support of

    And further help by Gaga, Mexico City / Los Angeles & Jenny’s, Los Angeles

    Program:

    SEPTEMBER
    Fr 9/7, 9 pm
    Reading from the comic Solito
    by Julien Ceccaldi (in Engl.)

    Sat 9/8, 4 pm
    Guided tour through the exhibition with Juliane Duft (in German)

    Sun 9/9, 7 pm
    Artist Talk with Julien Ceccaldi
    with the presentation of Japanese Animes (in Engl.)

    Thu 9/13, 5 pm
    Guided tour through the exhibition with Jasmin Werner (in German)

    Thu 9/20, 5 pm
    Guided tour through the exhibition with Nikola Dietrich (in German)

    Thu 9720, 6 pm
    Screening in the cinema
    Kunihiko Ikuhara, La Fillette Revolutionnaire Utena, 1999 (in the original with German subtitles)

    Tue 9/25, 6 pm
    Screening in the cinema
    Catherine Breillat, Barbe Bleue, 2009 (in the original with Engl. subtitles)

    Sun 9/30, 3 pm
    Guided tour through the exhibition (in German)

    OKTOBER
    Thu 10/11, 5 pm
    Guided tour through the exhibition with Juliane Duft (in German)

    Thu 10/11, 6 pm
    Screening in the cinema
    Catherine Breillat: La Belle Endormie, 2011 (in the original with Engl. subtitles)

    Thu 10/18, 6 pm
    Screening in the cinema
    Mori Masaki, The Door into Summer, 1975 (in the original with Engl. subtitles)

    Sun 10/21, 3 pm
    Guided tour through the exhibition (in German)

    Thu 10/25, 5 pm
    Guided tour through the exhibition (in German)

    Thu 10/25, 6 pm
    Screening in the cinema
    Catherine Breillat, 36 Fillette, 1988 (in the original with Engl. subtitles)

    NOVEMBER
    Sat 11/3, 7 pm – 2 pm
    Museumsnacht 2018
    Guided tours through the exhibition and SOLITO BAR:
    Anime film screenings, karaoke & Japanese snacks
    with Bistro Kombu (Düsseldorf-Benrath)

    Wed 11/7, 5 pm
    Guided tour through the exhibition with Nikola Dietrich (in German)

    Wed 11/7, 6 pm
    Screening in the cinema
    Chantal Akerman, Golden Eighties, 1986 (35mm, in the original with German subtitles)
    with an introduction by Juliane Duft

    With kind support of the Filmclub 813

  • Solo Exhibition: Alex Da Corte – THE SUPƎRMAN, 20.4. – 17.6.2018
    Alex Da Corte, announcement for the exhibition The Superman at the Kölnischer Kunstverein 2018

    Alex Da Corte (*1980 Camden, New Jersey, USA) uses painting, sculpture, installation, and film to explore the conditions and intricacies of human perception and the reactions associated with it. Special attention is paid to the complexity of today’s consumer world and how it intertwines with social, cultural, and political spheres. And thus, concepts like desire, hope, and longing account for just as much of his work as the examination of terms like dependence, alienation, and a sense of being lost. The starting point for his artistic works is mostly found in objects and scenarios from his personal and more general social environment which he then transforms into works of art through modifications, changes of perspective, or contrasting juxtapositions that appeal powerfully to all the senses.

    Four cinematic works come together at the center of Alex Da Corte’s presentation to form a haunting installation in the large hall of the Kölnischer Kunstverein. These works include TRUƎ LIFƎ, which was made in 2013, as well as the three-part work BAD LAND, which was created in 2017. Despite being created at different times, both pieces share a point of origin that is closely connected to a personal experience of the artist. A friend sent him a photograph a few years ago that seemed to show him in front of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa in the Musee du Louvre in Paris, although the photograph was actually of the American rapper Eminem. This confusion was based on a certain similarity between the two and prompted Alex Da Corte to begin working with the idea of the world-famous musician, who had been repeatedly criticized in the past for glorifying violence and being hostile towards homosexuals and women, and his Slim Shady alter ego. He was interested in the question of what makes up Eminem as a person, what psychology is involved, and how he would behave in a private environment. His interest finally culminated in the work TRUƎ LIFƎ, for which he took on the role of the rapper by dyeing his hair blond, putting on the appropriate clothing, and adopting his persona. In reference to the documentary 66 Scenes from America by Danish filmmaker Jørgen Leth in which Pop Art artist Andy Warhol eats a hamburger, TRUƎ LIFƎ depicts Eminem as played by Alex Da Corte eating a North American breakfast cereal called Life. Despite a compositional sophistication that recalls the simple actions of artists like Bas Jan Ader, Gilbert & George, and Bruce Nauman, the plainness of the scene forms a contrast to the glamor and fame – not to mention the drive and drastic behavior – that the rapper embodies. Eminem is portrayed by Alex Da Corte more as a human being than as an inaccessible and invincible celebrity, whereby the casual but nevertheless noticeable placement of a package of Cinnamon Life with the image of an African American boy on it also expands on socio-political aspects.
    The three Bad Land films, the title of which refers to an underprivileged district of Philadelphia where the artist’s studio is located known as the Badlands, were conceived by Alex Da Corte as a cohesive work and are a continuation of the ideas addressed in TRUƎ LIFƎ. The first film shows the musician in a setting divided into two areas: Its clear-cut, uniformly red and yellow tones is reminiscent of a pop version of Ellsworth Kelly or Blinky Palermo. In the almost eleven-minute sequence, the protagonist is busy untangling a chaotic bunch of old Playstation controllers and then arranging them neatly on a table-like base. For Alex Da Corte, the action functions as an allegory of fear, power, and control, whereby the banality of the scene once again breaks away from the general image of Eminem.
    In contrast, the second film in the BAD LAND series makes significantly clearer reference to the practices of a rapper. Accompanied by atmospheric sounds, the film shows how the musician smokes cannabis with homemade pipes and bongs. It is surprising how perfectly, artistically, and humorously the smoking devices are made from various everyday objects, and without losing their functionality. In the course of the consumption, the smoker appears to fall into a trance-like state that is accompanied by a deep laugh and intense cough that seems to trace back to a lack of routine.
    Finally, the third and last film in the BAD LAND series shows the rapper performing probably the most unusual action. Eminem, as depicted by Da Corte, stands in front of a grey background and is busy coloring his hair by rubbing yellow mustard into it while accompanied by ambiguous sounds and tones. As the film progresses, he puts on a paper crown from a fast-food restaurant, which is then repeatedly rubbed with the condiment although it already shows clear traces of the treatment. This symbol of power, which is particularly popular in hip hop culture, is thus not only associated with the excesses of consumer society, but is also questioned with palpable humor. It can hardly come as a surprise in this context that the rapper seems to increasingly lose his mind towards the end of the sequence. After all, a symbol of power like a crown is always associated with the fear of losing power, while fast-food chains often stand for seductive illusions.

    The examination of psychological parameters as they are revealed both in the BAD LAND films as well as in TRUƎ LIFƎ represents a significant driving force for Alex Da Corte’s work in which the traditional boundaries between the different genres seem to dissolve. It can also be seen in the exhibition THE SUPƎRMAN, in which the films are embedded in a complex architecture that plays with the viewer’s perception and emotions with remarkable intensity. It is not just the sculptural presence of the films that becomes overwhelming, but also the picturesque installation that melts somewhere between Pop Art and Surrealism into an intoxicating gesamtkunstwerk that evokes memories of nightmares just as much as those of Disneyland.

    Alex Da Corte has had solo exhibitions at the New Museum in New York (2017), the Secession in Vienna (2017), the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams (2017), the Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam (2015), and the Institute for Contemporary Art in Philadelphia (2015). He has also participated in group exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (2017), the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk (2016), and the Biennale in Lyon (2015).

  • Solo Exhibition: Walter Price – Pearl Lines, 20.4. – 17.6.2018
    Walter Price, announcement for the exhibition Pearl Lines at the Kölnischer Kunstverein 2018

    Walter Price was born in 1989 in Macon, in the US state of Georgia, and currently lives in the multicultural metropolis of New York. The artist’s predominately small-format work can be broken down into paintings and drawings in which he deals with personal experiences, social conventions, as well as historical developments. His works usually depict interiors or exteriors that are occupied by objects, creatures, signs, symbols, and forms. They contain references to limbs, figures, palm trees, huts, sofas, urinals, and cars as well as the outlines of architecture or vegetation. At the same time, these visual elements – which are sometimes more easily deciphered than others – are not always brought into a clear relationship with each other, making a form of narration palpable, yet intangible. This is supported not least by the fact that the American artist forgoes traditional patterns of order in his compositions, subverts hierarchies, and does away with perspective, all of which lends his paintings and drawings an unusual appearance that occasionally refers to the beautiful simplicity and purism of drawings by children.

    Occasionally letters and writing can be made out in Price’s works, although they are mostly only visible when truncated and partially hidden and therefore seem to be more like an echo of a verbalized thought rather than designed for instant readability. Another characteristic feature of many of Price’s works is an intense, vivid use of color that can be put down to a superb handling of the pallet. In addition, a large number of works are characterized by a heightened interest in the materiality of the raw materials he uses, which can be traced to both a strongly gestural and therefore palpably tactile application of paint as well as to leaving the painting and drawing foundations visible. In doing so, a conscious confrontation with representatives of classical modernism in Europe and the last outliers of American post-war art can be seen in the strong and expressive use of color as well as the specific handling of materials, one in which the artist authoritatively formulates his own language despite any references.

    This exhibition at Kölnischer Kunstverein marks the first time Price’s work will be comprehensively presented and recognized in Germany. The aim is to focus on both older and newer works, complemented by site-specific wall paintings and drawings. In addition, the work is explained in a comprehensive, bilingual catalogue that accompanies and documents the presentation in Cologne.

    With the support of:

  • Solo Exhibition: Talia Chetrit – Showcaller, 17.2. – 25.3.2018
    Talia Chetrit, announcement for the exhibition Showcaller at the Kölnischer Kunstverein 2018

    The photographic work of Talia Chetrit (B. 1982, Washington D.C.) is characterized by a remarkable compositional sophistication and visual power, accompanied by a stringent programmatic objective. Her work includes self-portraits, portraits of family members, lovers, and friends, nudes, still lifes, and cityscapes that continuously reveal various intentional references to art history. Chetrit occasionally draws from photographs taken during her youth and re-contextualizes these images by inserting them into her current practice through a selective editing process.
    Regardless of the respective subject matter or approach to the development of each image, her interest resides in researching and disclosing the basic social, conceptual, and technical conditions of the genre of photography. As a result, her work is imbued with the desire to control the physical and historical limitations of the camera, to follow its manipulative potential, and to call the relationship between the photographer and the image into question.

    The exhibition Showcaller, which Chetrit conceived especially for the Kölnischer Kunstverein, comprises a group of predominately new and revisited works that give exemplary insight into her practice. The presentation includes an extensive series of pictures titled Streets, which depict lively and inhabited views of New York City. Through the use of tight cropping of grainy negatives, the city and its people become an unknowing and abstracted network of bodies over which Chetrit can command her own manipulated narratives. Taken from afar and through the windows of various buildings, the distance between Chetrit’s pervasive lens and her unwitting subjects’ anonymity is further emphasized.
    In the context of the exhibition, this series of works is juxtaposed with photographs that convey an alternative perspective, and instead instill a pronounced sense of intimacy through the conspicuous disclosure of private moments. A large-format diptych, for example, depicts the artist and her partner having sex. Imaged against a blooming landscape, neither of the subjects seem aware of the camera’s austere gaze. The viewer is tethered to the scene by the twisting cord of the camera’s cable release, in such a way that we are reminded, once again, of our own position in the construction of images.

    Talia Chetrit was born in Washington D.C. in 1982 and now lives in New York. She has recently participated in solo and group exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (2016), Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto (2016), LAXART in Los Angeles (2014), Palais de Tokyo in Paris (2013), Studio Voltaire in London (2013), and the SculptureCenter in New York (2012). In 2018, she will be presented to a wider public in Italy for the first time at the MAXXI Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo in Rome.

    With the support of:

    The exhibition is kindly supported by Andra Lauffs-Wegner & KAT_A

  • Solo Exhibition: Adriano Costa – wetANDsomeOLDstuff VANDALIZEDbyTHEartist, 17.2. – 25.3.2018
    Adriano Costa, announcement for the exhibition wetANDsomeOLDstuff VANDALIZEDbyTHEartist at the Kölnischer Kunstverein 2018

    In the space of almost ten years Adriano Costa has created a body of work that establishes a bridge between South American and European art, updates artistic movements like Neoconcretismo or Arte Povera and provides them with a new dimension. Born in 1975 this Brazilian artist makes assemblages, sculptures, paintings and films on the basis of found materials and everyday objects; in his exhibitions he combines them together into expansive installations in such a way that they result in stage-like scenes comparable with “environments”. At the same time, his works are usually the result of extensive and time-consuming research, which Costa carries out wherever he is staying at the moment. Like a curious and open-minded tourist he thus explores his various “research areas” and, in doing so, he follows not just the well-known main paths, but also and particularly those routes within urban as well as rural contexts which receive less attention or are overlooked. He is interested in ethnological, sociological and historical developments and phenomena, and he makes these the subject matter of his works, but without employing the precise practices of scholars. For Costa the different themes and lines of enquiry serve, to a certain extent, as a vehicle for his poetic and not infrequently humorous articulations, which he forms out of the found pieces, mementoes and objects from the given explorations and investigations. The boundaries between art and “non-art” are occasionally undermined within this context, testifying to his efforts to more closely intertwine art and life.

    With the support of:

    The exhibition is kindly supported by Andra Lauffs-Wegner & KAT_A

2017
  • Solo Exhibition: Cameron Jamie – Bodies, Faces, Heads, 21.10. – 10.12.2017
    Cameron Jamie, Untitled 2017, Courtesy Two Palms, New-York, photo: David Regen

    Opening: Friday, 20. October 2017, 6-8 pm

    With Bodies, Faces, Heads, the Kölnischer Kunstverein presents Cameron Jamie’s first institutional solo exhibition in Germany. Born in Los Angeles in 1969 and currently based in Paris, Jamie has built a body of work over a good 25 years using an enormous variety of media: It comprises wood sculptures, ceramics, drawings, prints, photographs, films, artist’s books, and musical productions.

    One of his central themes is identity as the existential foundation of the individual, which is generated by social and anti-social codes. Jamie’s view of marginalized realities and magically obscure rituals that embody the hidden side of our society is both analytical and immersive at the same time: Jamie himself is partly shaped by the subcultures that he transforms artistically. His creative process is, therefore, anything but scientific or coolly calculated – Jamie follows a spontaneous, psychologically inspired search for form, the result of which is deeply personal while giving off an archaic, primitive atmosphere at the same time. It is about states of being and consciousness instead of concrete connections of meaning.

    The Kölnischer Kunstverein is presenting five groups of works revolving around the topic of the body and nature, all produced between 2008 and 2017. The group Smiling Disease (2008) consists of large-format wooden masks in the tradition of the Austrian Alpine region of Bad Gastein. Jamie produced them in collaboration with a professional wood carver who re-interpreted Jamie’s drawings and lent them a grotesque, deformed countenance. Ceramics on metal pedestals are shown in the second room, ghostly figures hand-produced by the artist that intertwine with the organic flow of the plinth forms in the third room. The direct, powerful treatment of the clay, the pulsating variety of form, and the elaborate glazing all allow the figures to lead a life of their own like alien beings in the room.

    A series of ceramic masks hangs on the walls, their interiors presenting as peculiar, hollow faces, like monotypes that evoke a variety of floral and figurative associations. Each work on paper is unique and contains several layers of drawings and colors – a characteristic that reflects Jamie’s creative process in general: erasing, overwriting, destroying, and restoring are fundamental features inherent in each of his works.

    Cameron Jamie’s previous solo exhibitions have included the Kunsthalle Zürich in Zürich (2013), the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles (2010), the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nantes (2009), and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (2006). He has also been part of group exhibitions like The Absent Museum at Wiels Center of Contemporary Art in Brussels (2017), the Lyon Biennale (2015), the Berlin Biennale (2010 and 2008), and the Venice Biennale (2005). His work was first shown at Kölnischer Kunstverein within the framework of the exhibition Keine Donau: Cameron Jamie, Peter Kogler, Kurt Kren (2006).

    Supported by

  • Solo Exhibition: Sam Anderson – Big Bird, 1.7. – 10.9.2017
    Sam Anderson, announcement for the exhibition Big Bird at the Kölnischer Kunstverein 2017

    Sam Anderson was born in Los Angeles in 1982. In the recent past she has developed a body of work in which she examines the existential conditions of human life on the basis of her own biography and stories from her social milieu. Her artistic practice is focused on sculpture and installation, although she also makes films at regular intervals. The works of the artist, who now lives in New York, additionally range from narrative visual creations to almost indecipherable (and therefore seemingly abstract) formulations. Thus, in Anderson’s art, figures formed out of epoxy clay – such as a kneeling girl, a rider or a fishing teenager – meet with material collages that are based on a variety of sometimes found materials and objects – such as broken glass, feathers, pieces of wood, grape steams, flowers or grasses – and are structured according to definite but now always comprehensible criteria. The found animal skeletons, which are also a part of her repertoire and transfer another dimension of reality into her work, are to be situated between these two extremes: the unambiguously narrative sculptures and the scarcely interpretable arrangements.

    Independently of the sculptures’ formal appearance, special importance is to be assigned to the relationship between object and space. The works are designed to play with proportions and, in this context, the surrounding architecture serves to indicate scale. Every form of monumentality is subjected to a negation in the process, as is particularly underscored through the fragility of many of the pieces. For viewers, this situation means a continuous bird’s-eye view of the works, which Anderson joins into complex installations in their presentations. The interplay between the pieces causes the American artist’s presentations to behave like staged landscapes. It is precisely through her combination and intertwining of dissimilar works that she evokes the distinctive interactions and charged relationships which breathe life into the artworks and arrangements and substantially contribute to their fascinating effect. The artist creates pictures that not only appear no less lifelike than remote from life, but also mean an expansion of sculpture’s range of possibilities.

    A similar potential is connected with Anderson’s films, which once again reveal her occupation with collage techniques. To create them she combines her own or found footage, accompanied by music and speech, into new narratives. Dream-like scenarios are also composed in these works; however, in contrast to the sculptures and installations, they are substantially more strongly anchored in the here and now.

    The unique nature of Anderson’s work has brought her considerable renown in recent years, and she has already been included in several important exhibitions. The artist has had solo exhibitions at Rowhouse Project in Baltimore (2016), Tanya Leighton in Berlin (2015), Mother´s Tankstation in Dublin (2015), Between Arrival and Departure in Düsseldorf (2015), Off Vendome in Düsseldorf (2014) and Chapter NY in New York (2013). She has additionally participated in group exhibitions, including “ICHTS” at the Dortmunder Kunstverein (2016) and “Greater New York” at MoMA PS1 (2015).
    For the Kölnischer Kunstverein Anderson has developed a complex survey of her work that encompasses both older and new pieces, in order to enable visitors to gain extensive insight into her practice. In addition to the central exhibition hall and the cinema, the neighbouring cabinet of the Kölnischer Kunstverein will also be used to enable visitors to tour through Sam Anderson’s various narratives and formulations.

    The artist’s first catalogue as well as an edition of unique works will appear in connection with the exhibition, which is presented in cooperation with the SculptureCenter in New York.

    This project is supported by the Kunststiftung NRW as well as the Leinemann Stiftung.

  • Solo Exhibition: Avery Singer – Sailor, 27.4. – 11.6.2017
    Avery Singer, annoncement for the exhibition Sailor at the Kölnischer Kunstverein 2017, photo: David Lieske

    Avery Singer was born in New York in 1987, in the recent past, she has formed a body of work which can be reckoned among the most powerful contributions to the recent history of art and has provided the medium of painting with new impulses – particularly in the context of the changing technical conditions surrounding it. Thus the artist utilises 3D programs like SketchUp or Blender to produce virtual visual worlds: in terms of their formal appearance these can be read as simple animations and accordingly make direct reference to their origins. Singer uses an airbrush gun to transfer this visual creation to her usually large-format canvasses, thereby negating any sense of a distinctive “hand of the artist”. Her approach results in visual formulations that allude stylistically to French Cubism as well as grisaille painting and thus seem, in a certain sense, to proclaim an anachronistic aesthetic.

    At the level of content Singer thematises socio-political questions, in doing so, it is not uncommon for her to specifically focus on a humorous look at the rules and rituals of the art scene. For example, she has occupied herself with the process of a studio visit, the role of the artist or director as entertainer, the life of a muse or the image of the patron. Singer’s painting also repeatedly contains allusions to the great masters of the history of art, which also places particular emphasis on the conceptual aspects of her work.
    Thanks to the unique nature of her work as an artist, Avery Singer has already been included in numerous international exhibitions in recent years: she has had solo presentations at the Kunsthalle Zürich, at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Within the context of her exhibition at the Kölnischer Kunstverein, which will open with a barbecue party on the occasion of the ArtCologne 2017, the artist’s manner of working will be presented to a broader audience in Germany. At the same time, the exhibition also presents a new group of works in addition to her figurative compositions, they represent a stylistic break with her previous pieces and Singer uses them to explore the broad realm of abstraction. These works are embedded within an architecture developed specifically for them: the space and the art will be interwoven with one another within the framework of the exhibition.

    An artist’s book will appear in connection with the exhibition, which was developed in cooperation with the Vienna Secession.

    Kindly supported by:

  • Solo Exhibition: Danny McDonald – The Beads & Other Objects, 27.4. – 11.6.2017
    Danny McDonald, The Beads That Bought Manhattan, 2013, photo: ioulex

    Danny McDonald, born in 1971 in Los Angeles, became known as a member of the legendary Art Club 2000, an artists’ collective founded in 1992 by the no less historic New York gallery owner Colin de Land and which included seven students from The Cooper Union School of Arts. As part of their work, which included photographs, installations, texts, and performances, the group investigated phenomena such as the gentrification of the urban context, the strategies of the art market, and the psychology of the fashion industry. In the process, their concepts and productions manifested a fundamental interest in institutional critique, not least as a reaction to the living and working conditions of their generation.

    The artistic work that McDonald is developing, detached from his activities as a member of the Art Club 2000, is shaped by the experiences he gathered during the 1990s, whereby his current work not only has a different appearance, but also describes a new dimension. McDonald’s practice encompasses in particular sculptures and films that complement and stimulate each other, and which are characterized by a great sovereignty in the contemporary art context. For his haptically tangible works, he mainly uses toy figures, but occasionally also other everyday objects, which he combines according to the principles of the assemblage technique in such a way that new contexts of meaning and unprecedented narratives emerge. The bizarre and scurrile that is often inherent in the arrangements due to the contradictory nature of the objects used can be regarded as one of the specific characteristics of the artist’s sculptures. They reflect the artist’s endeavour to use his keen wit and humour to create a distorting mirror of social and socio-political situations. McDonald’s cinematic works, which generally have a strong visual as well as auditory power, point in a similar direction. For these works, the artist makes use of various alter egos, which appear as protagonists of the films and lead through surreal-looking narratives.

    The exhibition The Beads & Other Objects, which is being held at the Kölnischer Kunstverein on the occasion of ArtCologne 2017, is the first solo presentation of Danny McDonald in a European institution.

  • Exhibition: ars viva 2017 – Jan Paul Evers, Leon Kahane & Jumana Manna, 11.2. – 26.3.2017

    The exhibition ars viva 2017: Jan Paul Evers, Leon Kahane, Jumana Manna opened on 10 February 2017 at the Kölnischer Kunstverein. Since 1953 the Kulturkreis der deutschen Wirtschaft im BDI e.V. (the Association of Arts and Culture of the German Economy at the Federation of German Industries) has been awarding the annual ars viva prize to young artists living in Germany whose works are distinguished by their pioneering potential. The ars viva award brings prize money, two exhibitions, a bilingual catalogue and a residence programme on Fogo Island (Canada).
    Works by this year’s recipients, Jan Paul Evers, Leon Kahane and Jumana Manna, will be shown in Cologne. These artists are distinguished by their different ways of working and their use of various media. The exhibition presents a selection of earlier works and new, previously unexhibited pieces. This is the Kölnischer Kunstverein’s second cooperation with the Kulturkreis. Works by the 2009 prize winners were exhibited in the galleries of the Kunstverein at that time.

    Jan Paul Evers works with digital and analogue photographic production and editing processes. Using various developing techniques he makes black-and-white prints from photographic material created by himself or others and featuring abstract and representational motifs. His compositions shift the focus on to the relationship between image and replica, motif and reality, and they examine the possibilities of (photographic) reproduction. The artist is showing a number of new works at the Kölnischer Kunstverein.

    Leon Kahane engages critically with social themes like the construction of territorial boundaries and the problematic conditions of labour migration. He makes reference to media revolutions and global developments, for example, in his Frontex photo series. Here he seemingly casually visualises the conflicts along Europe’s territorial boundaries, which are caused by cultural and economic conditions. The works that Kahane is presenting in Cologne include a piece that was created during his six-month stay in Hong Kong and sheds light on the working conditions of female immigrants from the Philippines.

    In her videos and sculptural works Jumana Manna develops narratives that read like possible histories. Her artistic field research traces identity-building stories operating within the charged space connecting the private sphere and the national plane. In Cologne Manna is showing an adaptation of a work originally commissioned by the 2016 Liverpool Biennial. Among other things, this installation makes reference to the Post Herbarium at the American University of Beirut, which archives the biological diversity of Syria, Palestine and Sinai.

    With kind support by:

  • Solo Exhibition: Leidy Churchman – Free Delivery, 11.2. – 26.3.2017
    Leidy Churchman, Free Delivery, Kölnischer Kunstverein, 2017, Installation view, photo: Simon Vogel

    The artist Leidy Churchman is concerned with the question of how images are perceived and processed in the present age, when visual stimuli display an omnipresence. Within this context, Churchman – who was born in the American community of Villanova, Pennsylvania, in 1979 – produces paintings based on pre-existing images from the “extraordinary junkyard” of visual formulations. Thus he copies the works of other artists and uses logos, book covers or advertisements as sources or makes references to Far Eastern religions or art related to folklore. For this reason the pictorial universe that confronts us in Churchman’s presentations often seems familiar, even if the paintings differ from their sources to a greater or lesser extent.

    Churchman’s solo exhibition at the Kölnischer Kunstverein is his first institutional presentation in Europe. For this show he has produced a new group of works which display a disconcerting heterogeneity at first glance. At the exhibition our attention is immediately grabbed by the large-format painting Standoff, which shows two giraffes standing in high grass with their necks crossed. While this painting seems to be more or less clearly comprehensible, a small-format landscape painting entitled “Faultless Aspect” exhibits more surreal features: illuminated by a magnificent full moon, a kind of net spreads out across a deep-green meadow and, in combination with two white pillows and a bedside table, becomes a bed. The painting Peacocking, which is dominated by two red-and-black, organic-looking forms as well as countless, tangibly palpable dots, does not allow us to identify any clear narrative and points to the field of abstraction. By contrast, in the work The Kitchen Sink, we can read The Laundry Room in white letters on a deep blue background, and it seems to be the direct transfer of a sign into the medium of painting. The painting Mahakala, on the other hand, makes reference to the Buddhist deity of the same name, although Churchman has limited himself to the signifier of his mouth in his work. This is embedded within a greenish-bluish composition of colours and forms in a manner that stimulates the impression of looking into this orifice through a peculiar kind of peephole. The link connecting all of these different works is the common world they share: a world that has become almost impossible to grasp and from which Churchman selects images in order to present them to his viewers with an altered tempo, feeling and state of mind. In doing so, the New Yorker’s visual formulations go beyond a mere transfer into the medium of painting. Churchman’s works are linked with an inexplicable and mysterious magic that it is very difficult to escape.

    Leidy Churchman lives and works in New York. He has recently participated in much-discussed thematic exhibitions including Painting 2.0: Expression in the Information Age at Munich’s Museum Brandhorst (2015) and at mumok – Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien (2016). In recent years he has also presented works at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (2016), the Kunsthalle Bern (2015), the National Gallery of Denmark in Copenhagen (2014) and at MoMA/P.S.1 in New York (2010). In 2013 Churchman had a solo exhibition at the Boston University Art Gallery and the first monograph on his work as an artist was created to accompany it.

    Kindly supported by:

2016
  • Solo Exhibition: Christiana Soulou – Sonnet to the Nile, 28.10. – 18.12.2016
    Christiana Soulou, In The Prison With The Birds, 1982, Kölnischer Kunstverein 2016

    The Kölnischer Kunstverein is presenting Sonnet to the Nile, Christiana Soulou’s first institutional solo exhibition in Germany. Since the early 1980s the artist has been working on a body of drawings that can be counted among the most remarkable articulations in the field of this art form. The art of this Athenian born in 1961 is centred around human and animal beings that appear on the paper without any context or any connection to a time or place. The drawings are simultaneously so understated that they usually cannot be perceived without a more thorough consideration. Even then they often cannot be grasped in their entirety, because in spite of their forceful presence, they seem to disappear into the ground of the drawing. The majority of Soulou’s creations remain monochrome – in shades of grey, blue or red – and supplementary coloration can only occasionally be identified. On the whole Soulou’s works captivate viewers through a subtlety and precision that are characteristic of Old Master drawings or etchings and represent a rarity within the context of current developments in art. This has earned the Greek artist recognition among her younger colleagues, in particular, and resulted in her enjoying the reputation of an artist’s artist. In this context it should be emphasised that every line Soulou places on the paper by means of pencil, coloured pencil or watercolour cannot be looked at solely as the result of extraordinary technical ability. Far more significant is the fact that the artist experiences the making of even minor marks with a great intensity, thus emotionally projecting herself into the depicted being with a powerful empathic faculty.
    Literary works provide the point of departure for many drawings, which are conceived either as individual sheets or in series. Soulou has studied the works of authors like William Shakespeare, Heinrich von Kleist, Georges Bataille, Jean Cocteau or Jorge Luis Borges for years and years, some of them since her youth. The connection with these works is suggested by the titles and subtitles of her works on paper, for example, when the protagonists of a particular text are explicitly named, descriptive approximations of scenes from a novel are carried out or complete book titles are utilised as supplemental titles for groups of works. Thus references to texts including Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Cocteau’s Les Enfants Terribles or Borges’s El libro de los seres imaginarios can be recognised in the context of the exhibition. At the same time, Soulou’s drawings are to be seen not as illustrations of the texts but as a more general exploration of Being: existential experiences, but also the mysteries of life, are what occupy Soulou and it is their traces that she pursues in her drawings – with meticulousness, mental sharpness and emotion.

    Christiana Soulou has had solo exhibitions at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art in Newcastle (2016), among other places. She has also participated in group exhibitions including those at Camden Arts Centre in London (2016) and the New Museum in New York (2010) as well as the Biennale di Venezia (2013) and the Berlin Biennale (2006).

    with kind support by:

  • Solo Exhibition: Catharine Czudej – SHHHHH, 9.7. – 4.9.2016
    Catharine Czudej: Untitled, 2014.

    The Kölnischer Kunstverein presents SHHHHH, Catharine Czudej’s first solo exhibition in Germany. The artist was born in Johannesburg in 1985 and now lives in New York. Her work encompasses sculptures, installations, paintings and films which reflect her occupation with labor, power dynamics and moral structures. Her art is characterized by its humorous approach and absurdist take on the everyday. Responding to canonised ideas or phenomena Czudej sets off a chain of free associations linked to the cultural subconscious in an attempt to implicate the viewer in her conspiracy.

    Czudej has gathered together both existing and newly produced works in the central hall of the Kölnischer Kunstverein to form an “environment” that suggests an apartment in many respects, calling to mind the work of Pop artists like Claes Oldenburg or the installations of Paul Thek. In the space we find a sitting room, a sofa, various lamps and a game room as well as items typical of a bathroom. However, the domestic objects cannot fulfil their promise of utilitarian value: the lamps and seating are made out of pretzels and beer bottles, whilst the living room carpet absorbs the couch and the bathroom resembles an improvised artists laboratory. Czudej uses the objects to stage bizarre deformations of reality, which raise questions about both the everyday unconscious and modes of perception.

    At the entrance to the exhibition is a queue formed from retractable barriers laid out as a maze; reducing the traditional logic of boundary and wayfinding systems to absurdity. The artist sees this intervention as representative of our willing and often unquestioning engagement with systems of social control. At the entrance to the maze waits the ostensible single inhabitant of the apartment: a life-size balloon figure that signifies to the viewer that this is perhaps a game, and things might not seem as they appear. The installation also functions as satirical commentary on the spectacular and grandios application of these barriers as an exhibition tool to contain and excite the spectator before viewing work.

    While the works in the central exhibition space have been merged into a narrative installation, the objects on the lower level at first resemble a more stringent formal presentation. These pieces have been installed on sand and stone pedestals, that mimic museological forms of display and correspond to the apparently classical theme of Czudej’s sculptures. With their fluid interweaving forms, the objects formally play on Eduardo Chillida’s iron sculptures, although the artist undermines the gravity and monumentality of the Spanish sculptor’s works by integrating figurative details. The faces and hands that interact with the forged twisted metal invest the works with a comic-like quality, which not only corresponds to Czudej’s general search for narratives, but also shifts the focus to discussions surrounding authorship and gender roles.

    Czudej’s new film, which will be shown in the cinema of the Kölnischer Kunstverein, complements the exhibition and represents a new facet in the artist’s work. It documents the day to day experience in one of American’s oldest foundry’s where Czudej makes her Iron and Bronze sculptures. The film alternates between the banal and the explosive moments of foundry life, suggesting both conceptual aspects and a societal study.

    Catharine Czudej’s solo exhibitions already include those at Office Baroque in Brussels (2016), Peep-Hole in Milan (2015) and Ramiken Crucible in New York (2013). She has also participated in numerous international group exhibitions, including those at Off Vendome in New York (2016), Galerie Eva Presenhuber in Zurich (2016), Eden Eden in Berlin (2015), Zero in Milan (2014) and François Ghebaly Gallery in Los Angeles (2014).

    On the occasion of the exhibition a limited edition will be released.

  • Solo Exhibition: Andro Wekua – Anruf, 15.4. – 19.6.2016
    Andro Wekua, Anruf, Kölnischer Kunstverein, 2016, Installation view, photo: Simon Vogel

    Andro Wekua was born in Georgia in 1977. Over a period of more than ten years he has created an outstanding body of work that can be counted among the most impressive, but simultaneously also the most mysterious, contributions to recent contemporary art. Based on his own biography, which was shaped by events surrounding the civil war in his native country, Wekua’s work rotates around the question of how a personal or collective memory is formed, what the genuine substance of an individual or global memory is and what belongs to fiction, imagination and interpretation within this context. At the same time, the visual creations realised by the artist, who now lives in Germany and Switzerland, typically display a disturbing and uncanny quality and point to subconscious processes. Regardless of the given medium, Wekua’s works appeal directly to the emotional world of their viewers, although they often resist unambiguous interpretation – an aspect which actually helps fuel their unsettling effect.

    The exhibition at the Kölnischer Kunstverein is not only the artist’s first major show in the Rhineland area but also the first significantly comprehensive presentation in Germany in the last five years. The exhibited works demonstrate the cogency of his body of work in a representative manner. Thus, in the main exhibition hall, the artist presents a complex and expansive installation that transports viewers into a dream-like world. Its central focus is formed by an untitled life-sized figure (2014), which hangs from the ceiling in a prominent location and seems to be half androgynous human and half robot. This being is balanced on its chin atop a swing-like apparatus and is thus depicted in a physically impossible position, which further intensifies its already very striking strangeness and unworldliness.

    Where this sculptural work by Andro Wekua evokes aspects of the surreal and fantastic, the untitled painting of a seascape (2016), which is placed at a significant distance opposite the figure in the exhibition hall, points to a different tradition. In this work we can recognise allusions to 19th-century British and French landscape paintings as well as their expressively conceived early 20th-century pendants. At the same time, Wekua has condensed his work into a composition in colour that renders the sea’s various temperaments tangible on a psychological level.

    Within the exhibition space the painting and the sculpture join into a single unit, whose frame is formed by the architecture which was designed specifically for them and features various segmentations and an intense tonality. The effect linked to this theatrically staged presentation could scarcely be more penetrating: as a result it directly influences those who experience it and permanently etches itself in their consciousness.

    The conglomerate of this installation is supplemented by the presentation of Andro Wekua’s filmic works, which were created between 2003 and 2012 and are presented in the cinema of the Kölnischer Kunstverein. These works are partly based on found material and partly on sequences produced by the artist himself, and they oscillate between the genres of historical documentary, horror and science fiction. The films present images between memory, dream and vision and convey an atmosphere that is no less adept at getting under viewers’ skin.

    Andro Wekua’s solo exhibitions include those at the Kunsthalle Wien (2011), Fridericianum in Kassel (2011), Castello di Rivoli in Turin (2011), Camden Arts Centre in London (2008), Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam (2007) and Kunstmuseum Winterthur (2006). In 2011 he was also nominated for the Preis der Nationalgalerie.

    The exhibition is kindly supported by:

    and Julia Stoschek Collection

  • Solo Exhibition: Uri Aran – Mice, 13.2. – 27.3.2016
    Uri Aran, Mice, Kölnischer Kunstverein, 2016, Installation view, photo: Simon Vogel

    The Kölnischer Kunstverein is pleased to present Mice, the first comprehensive solo exhibition of Uri Aran in Germany. In his sculptures, paintings, drawings, films and photographs, the artist, who was born in Jerusalem in 1977 and now lives in New York, investigates the fundamentals of language, communication and perception, the conditions of social interaction as well as the social rules necessary for this. The basis of the works are mostly simple materials, signs, forms, images and gestures, which Aran relates to each other in such a way that new contexts of meaning emerge. The constellations create the impression of being part of a narrative, without, however, being able to trace a clear narrative.

    The exhibition at the Kölnischer Kunstverein brings together older works as well as works produced specifically for the institution and thus offers the opportunity for an intensive examination of the various facets of Aran’s work. One of the main works in the presentation is the sculpture Game (2016) installed in the large exhibition hall, which formally refers to ancient board games. The upper side of the work, made of plaster, is structured by round indentations, occasionally referring to fruit and vegetables, in which metal balls, nuts and dog biscuits can be arranged in different ways. In addition to examining the question of what criteria can be used to systematize and organize the various elements, the almost monumental-looking work reflects the idea of integrating the recipient into the work, as well as the aspect of the changeability of a sculpture.

    In contrast, Arans’ cinematic works, which flank Game in the central exhibition hall on the one hand and occupy the cinema of the Kölnischer Kunstverein on the other, allow us to understand his preoccupation with the emotional world of the recipient. A central interest here is the question of how an auditory or visual stimulus is formed and sent to evoke a certain emotional reaction. An example of this is the work Black Stallion (2011), which is the credits of the classic film of the same name by director Francis Coppola. The poignant music as well as the images of a child playing with a horse create a feeling of melancholy in the recipient that is hard to escape.

    The work Dog (2006), which shows the artist in frontal view stroking a dog while crying, with the animal – like the embrace of two people – placing its head over its shoulder, also has a similar effect. The film, which formally recalls the work I’m too sad to tell you by the Dutch artist Bas Jan Ader, who disappeared in 1975, appeals directly to the recipient’s empathy. Inevitably, a feeling of consternation and sadness is awakened, revealing the manipulative potential of the images as well as the sound.

    If the aforementioned cinematic works appear with a certain, but by no means overly clear vehemence, Uri Aran’s paintings and drawings have a rather unobtrusive character. Yet the works, which are shown at certain points in the central exhibition hall and in the stairwell and more comprehensively on the second floor and in a graphic workroom in the basement, display a relatively wide spectrum of forms of expression. Thus the paintings and drawings oscillate between abstraction and representationalism, with clearly legible portraits or sceneries alternating with gestural or colour compositions. In this context, inscribed letters and words can be made out in the works just as easily as collaged photographs or everyday objects. The different components condense within the paintings and drawings to formulate an unfathomable secret, which can also be seen as an essential feature of Uri Aran’s other works.

    In the recent past, Uri Aran has had solo exhibitions at Peep-Hole in Milan (2014), the Kunsthalle Zurich (2013) and the South London Gallery (2013), among others. He has also participated in the Whitney Biennial (2014) and the Venice Biennial (2013).

2015
  • Exhibition: Jahresgaben 2015, 2. – 20.12.2015

  • Solo Exhibition: Stephen G. Rhodes – Or the Unpreparedness Prometheus and Pals, 15.11. – 20.12.2015
    Stephen G. Rhodes, announcement for the exhibition Or the Unpreparedness Prometheus and Pals iat the Kölnischer Kunstverein 2015

    The installations of the artist Stephen G. Rhodes, who was born in Houston in 1977, are characterised by the use of diverse media and materials and are generally of an expansive nature. The works usually take historical events, social phenomena and art historical or film historical positions as their points of departure: the artist subjects these to analysis, compares them with alternative value systems and translates them into his own linguistic system. For his exhibition at the Kölnischer Kunstverein – his first institutional solo exhibition in Germany – Rhodes has created a new film for the cinema as well as a complex, walk-in installation for the exhibition hall.

    The show is centred around two places whose divergent developments Rhodes has linked together within the context of his exhibition and used as the basis of a narrative. The first of these is the Bayou Corne Sinkhole, located in a swampland in the south-east of the US state of Louisiana, and the second is Malta’s Sweethaven Village. The sinkhole developed in 2012, when the fracking procedure that an American company was employing in the area led to underground cave-ins, and the above-ground terrain was pulled down into the depths. In the period that followed, hundreds of local residents were evacuated from the nearby community in order to protect them from the menace of additional cave-ins.

    By contrast, Malta’s Sweethaven Village has a less burdened background and functions, in a certain sense, as a counterpart to the American disaster site. The village was created in 1979/80 as the backdrop for the director Robert Altman’s film Popeye. Because of the expense involved, it was not torn down after shooting was completed, and this eventually resulted in the residents of the island transforming it into an amusement park.

    The world of the imagination – as it has manifested itself in the Sweethaven Village – is thus confronted with the reality of industry, which borders on the realm of the unimaginable in the case of the Bayou Corne Sinkhole. At the same time, Rhodes links the stories of the two places with the immediately topical aspect of fleeing – or, alternatively, leaving – as well as the mythological figure of Prometheus and the main characters of Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein.

    Stephen G. Rhodes lives and works in Berlin and New Orleans. He has had solo exhibitions at the Migros Museum in Zurich (2013) and at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles (2010). He has additionally participated in group exhibitions, including those at the Kunst-Werke in Berlin (2015), the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art in San Francisco (2011) and at the New Museum in New York (2009).

  • Solo Exhibition: Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili – Hollow Body, 15.11. – 20.12.2015
    Ketuta Alexi Meskhishvili, Hollow Body, Kölnischer Kunstverein, 2015, Installation view, photo: Simon Vogel

    Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili, who was born in Tbilisi in 1979 and now lives in Berlin, investigates the possibilities of photography with extreme meticulousness. There is a central interest in the diverse methods of collage, which the artist employs in a virtuoso manner. Thus, she experiments with images and materials that are found or her own, and she combines these into new constellations. In the process, she not infrequently manipulates her source material by deliberately scratching it, cutting it or leaving other manual traces behind on it. The results are captured using analogue or digital methods of reproduction; however, the images that are created usually represent only an intermediate stage. Until the final print, highly diverse methods are employed to further rework them, so that the process corresponds more to a deliberate composition than the spontaneous capturing of a moment.

    The images developed by the artist within the framework of this process range from portraits, still lifes and architectural photos all the way to abstract works, and they refer just as much to the visual idiom and aesthetics of advertising as to the recent history of photography and art. Independently of the given subject matter, many of the works are characterised by an enigmatic quality that significantly contributes to the effect which they exercise. They are brought to life by the ruptures that are both inherent to the photographs as a result of the multistage process of their production and also hold their viewers at a distance.

    Specifically for her presentation at the Kölnischer Kunstverein – the artist’s first institutional solo exhibition – Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili has developed a new group of works that encompasses both photographs and installations. In the second storey, an assortment of photographs is presented opposite a translucent curtain hanging in the well of the staircase and printed with various motifs. Taken as a whole, the various artworks provide a comprehensive impression of the complexity of Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili’s work – an artist whose pieces have drawn international attention in the recent past, for example, at the New Museum of New York.

    This exhibition is supported by the Stiftung Kunst, Kultur und Soziales of the Sparda-Bank West.

  • Solo Exhibition: João Maria Gusmão + Pedro Paiva – The Missing Hippopotamus, 29.8. – 25.10.2015
    Gusmão+Paiva, Kölnischer Kunstverein, 2015, Installation view, photo: Simon Vogel

    Situations in which the explicable and rationally comprehensible are confronted with the impenetrable represent one of the central areas of interest of the artist duo João Maria Gusmão (b.1979 in Lisbon) + Pedro Paiva (b.1977 in Lisbon). Their work consists of films, photographs and camera obscura installations as well as sculptures, and it presents physics experiments, natural processes and everyday or historical episodes. These are usually associated with mysterious and not infrequently also extrasensory aspects. The seemingly scientific, objective view of things that simultaneously defines many of their works introduces the inexplicable into our familiar reality, but without ridding it of its enigmatic quality.

    The works’ distinctive effect quickly drew substantial attention to the duo, so that the two Portuguese artists are already able to look back on an impressive history of exhibitions. They have thus exhibited at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco (2008), at the IKON Gallery in Birmingham (2010), at the Kunsthaus Glarus in the Swiss town of Glarus (2012), and at the Hangar Bicocca in Milan (2014), among other institutions. In 2009 they also represented Portugal at the 53rd Venice Biennale.

    In the context of the exhibition at the Kölnischer Kunstverein the duo’s sculptures will be placed in the foreground for the first time. These have been presented only rather rarely in previous exhibitions, and in the recent past they have taken on increasing importance in the practice of Gusmão + Paiva. As in their films and photographs, the Portuguese duo also use this specific group of works to examine our relationship to reality and to turn it upside down with great subtlety, meticulousness and – not least – with humour, as well. The works are generally cast in bronze and deal with everyday objects, scientific instruments, architecture and animals, among other things. These are subjected to a sometimes surreal semantic shift by means of unusual and occasionally contradictory constellations.

    The sculptural works to be placed in the pavilion are supplemented by new works on film, which were conceived specifically for the cinema and for the Riphahnsaal of the Kölnischer Kunstverein and can be seen as prime examples of the two artists’ exploration of the moving image. A camera obscura has additionally been planned for the lower level of the institution: in this way the exhibition will not only provide an opportunity for visitors to occupy themselves with Gusmão + Paiva’s sculptures in greater depth, it will also plainly demonstrate the relationship between this specific group of works and the other areas of their artistic body of work.

    This exhibition is supported by the Kunststiftung NRW.

  • Solo Exhibition: Petrit Halilaj – ABETARE, 17.4. – 2.8.2015
    Petrit Halilaj, ABETARE, Kölnischer Kunstverein, 2015, Installation view, photo: Simon Vogel

    Please notice the exhibition pauses: 17 April – 7 June / 18 June – 2 August 2015

    In installations, drawings and films Petrit Halilaj (*1986) deals with the experiences he gathered in this period: with a great capacity for empathy, he examines thematic complexes including homeland, memory and identity. At the same time there is always something universally valid bound up with the artist’s works, which resemble a materialisation of the world of the storytellers. In this way they speak to and lastingly touch their viewers, regardless of those viewers’ relationship to the recent history of south-eastern Europe.

    For the exhibition at the Kölnischer Kunstverein, Halilaj has created an entirely new group of works related to his former school in Runik (Kosovo). The artist has used thin steel rods to reproduce greatly enlarged versions of doodles and drawings once left behind by pupils on the seats and desks of the classrooms. In spite of their clearly sculptural form, the objects still preserve a graphic character and develop an effect suggesting delicate drawings in space. The depicted motifs include houses, hearts, birds, flowers, cars, aeroplanes, rockets and rifles, and they are simultaneously witness to the hopes, yearnings and dreams and to the doubts, fears and worries of the children and adolescents of that time. In the exhibition Halilaj concentrates the individual objects into a complex installation in such a way that the thoughts reflected in the sculptures overlap and become interwoven with one another.

    Along with the sculptures and installations, Halilaj is also presenting a new film and a series of prints, which are likewise related to the artist’s former school; however, they draw attention more towards the aspect of the educational institution’s authority.

    Program:
    Wednesday, 29 April, 7pm: lecture by Petrit Halilaj about his exhibition
    Sunday, 10 May, 3pm: tour with Moritz Wesseler and Rein Wolfs through the Petrit Halilaj exhibition at the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn
    Sunday, 17 May, 3–5pm: children’s workshop on the exhibition for International Museum Day
    (please make a reservation: info@koelnischerkunstverein.de)
    Sunday, 17 May, 3pm / 5pm: tours through the exhibition by Petrit Halilaj
    Wednesday, 20 May, 7pm: tour with Moritz Wesseler and Rein Wolfs through the Petrit Halilaj exhibition at the Kölnischer Kunstverein

    A collaboration between the Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Bonn, and the Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne. The first comprehensive monograph on the artist’s work will appear on the occasion of the exhibitions.

    With kind support of Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach-Stiftung.

  • Solo Exhibition: Ryan McLaughlin – Lacus PM, 6.2. – 22.3.2015

    Opening: Thu, 5 February 2015, 5 pm
    Exhibition: 6 February – 22 March 2015

    With Lacus PM the Kölnischer Kunstverein presents the first institutional solo exhibition of the US-American painter Ryan McLaughlin. The artist, who was born in 1980 in Worcester, Massachusetts, and now lives in Sunapee, New Hampshire, has produced an outstanding body of work in recent years, which will be presented in Cologne on the basis of eight works from 2012 to 2015. The works, most of which were produced with oil paint on MDF and canvas, have something unpretentious about them, which is not only due to the use of the reduced, unobtrusive color palette. The small size of the works, which ranges between the format of a cigar box and that of a theatre or cinema poster, also contributes to this impression. While a few years ago McLaughlin’s works often featured still lifes or depictions of more or less familiar-looking figures and everyday objects in a comic-like manner – as for example in Chicken Rabbit (2012), the earliest painting in the exhibition – the motifs of most of the works assembled in Cologne can be categorized less clearly. Much of the work is shadowy, seems as if hinted at, and can only be categorized more clearly in the course of a catchy observation. Occasionally, the German-language titles offer an orientation to gain access to the paintings or their contents. The title Weather (2014), for example, complements the sketchy representation of a map of Germany with corresponding symbols for sun or rain as familiar from daily newspapers. In contrast, the painting Wasserbetriebe (2014) can be understood as a reference to the Berlin waterworks, as in the work a part of the official lettering of the utility company is adapted, which among other things meets the depiction of a dripping tap as well as a historical steamship. The confrontation with symbols and lettering of our everyday and commodity world – as is also shown by the use of the logo of the Seitenbacher company, which specializes in natural foods, in the work entitled Dinkel (2014) – seems to form an essential starting point for the American’s current works, which initially connects him formally with the tradition of Pop Art. But where the American art movement focused on the constant repetition and reproduction of mostly well-known sign systems and icons, McLaughlin rather focuses on peripheral symbols and lettering in order to transfer them into the realm of abstraction through their schematic representation. The preoccupation with abstract painting thus represents a further important aspect that characterizes the works of Ryan McLaughlin. The way in which the artist consciously distances himself from clear forms, arranges surfaces, allows different layers of paint application and the flow of the brush to become apparent, or marks the boundaries of the paintings with irregular strokes and lines, can be seen not only as a further important factor in the special appeal of the works, but also as an allusion to history and the various forms of European and American abstraction. Moreover, these specific characteristics of the works also reveal an interest in the question of what constitutes a painting and how it can be read or deciphered. These conceptual trains of thought form the background of the works assembled in Cologne, against which Ryan McLaughlin formulates convincing paintings that have an inherent quiet, unobtrusive power.

  • Solo Exhibition: Darren Bader – The World as Will and Representation, 6.2. – 22.3.2015
    Darren Bader, The World as Will and Representation, Kölnischer Kunstverein, 2015, Installation view, photo: Simon Vogel


    Exhibition open to public from 5 February 2015, 7 pm
    Exhibition: 6 February – 22 March 2015

    In Darren Bader’s first institutional solo exhibition in Europe, everything seems different than expected: Not only does the show at the Kölnischer Kunstverein bear three titles, beginning on February 6, but it doesn’t officially open until the 27th of the same month. The exhibits also give the impression that they are difficult to grasp. Thus, Bader plans to present some of his works from week to week in different areas inside or outside the building. Others will only be part of the exhibition for a short time.

    But it is not only the form and sequence of the exhibition that defy the supposed parameters of the exhibition. The 31 works planned for the show – including sound works, films, text works, objects and installations – also promise some surprises. For instance, Bader’s works usually correspond only to a small extent to the common notion of what a work of art is. This is only marginally due to the fact that in many of his works Bader refers back to the now more than a century old tradition of the readymade principle founded by Marcel Duchamp and declares everyday objects to be art. Of central importance in this context is rather the aspect of how Darren Bader employs the aforementioned idea and what implications are associated with the works. Many works are associated with certain conditions, tasks and challenges that define how the respective object is to be handled. In contrast to his French colleague, Bader thus integrates the recipient much more strongly into his works. In the enticing sounding work Pretty Face, which like all of the artist’s works is undated, each visitor determines individually what constitutes a “beautiful face”. The artistic contribution thus lies solely in the definition of the framework, while the recipient has the task of making a choice. Depending on the visitor, the freestyle can thus be performed differently or not at all.

    Questions of authorship, as evoked in Pretty Face, also characterize works such as To Have and to Hold – object J1, in which the – mostly optional – tasks and possibilities of the owner are brought to bear even more clearly: The work is based on the idea that the owner of the work acquires a book of Candida Höfer’s photographs of On Kawara’s date images, studies it for a year, collects further copies of the publication for as long as desired, and finally introduces them into the everyday life of other people. The manifestation of the work is thus by no means static, but – depending on the collector – in a constant process.

    A different form of dealing with questions of authorship is also evident in the work 110 x 5 x 166.5 cm, which is a photograph of a boy in the dimensions given. In order to realize this work, Bader did not work as a photographer, but bought the work of a colleague, which he subsequently passed off as his own creation, thereby re-declaring the photographic work as a sculpture. Inevitably, this act not only demonstrates a critical examination of the mechanisms of the art market, but also a shrewd investigation of when and how something becomes a work.

    The thoughts reflected in the works mentioned go far beyond the classical conceptual art with which Darren Bader’s work is repeatedly related. Especially the moments of the absurd, which can be traced in many of the pieces, represent a clear distinguishing feature from the art movement founded in the 1960s. The absurd and ludicrous nature of some of the works rather points in the direction of Surrealism, which becomes recognizable as an important influence in the course of a more intensive examination of Bader’s practice. This circumstance is particularly evident in a group of works for which Bader combines opposing objects, concepts and thoughts to form pairs, thus referring back to a strategy formulated by the French avant-garde movement at the beginning of the 20th century. In the context of the exhibition, this group includes perfume with/and trapezoid, pair of jeans and/with $228, patella with/and theater tickets, sugar and/with axe as well as glasses with/and glasses, for which any number of representatives of the various objects can potentially be used. The everydayness of the objects used makes it possible to discern a strong difference to the works of Surrealism, as they were usually conceived more clearly than works of art.

    The fact that Bader uses found objects for the majority of his works makes it difficult in many cases to capture objects with certainty as exhibits. This factor therefore also gives an idea of the endeavour to sound out the boundaries between art and non-art and, if necessary, to dissolve them completely. At the Kölnischer Kunstverein, the American artist takes the aforementioned ambitions to the extreme with works such as person sitting in passenger seat of car, for which at certain times – as the English term implies – someone sits in the passenger seat of a car in front of the exhibition house. Without the knowledge of the work, one would thus inevitably overlook the work of art and perceive the scenery – if at all – as an everyday situation.

    If person sitting in passenger seat of car is a successful balancing act between the visibility and invisibility of a work, Bader pursues completely different goals with the film OSS, which was produced especially for the Kölnischer Kunstverein. Darren Bader wrote the screenplay for the animated science fiction film, which is about a whimsical and comical competition at the United Nations, in which the proposal to build sculptures for space is drawn by lot. In keeping with the bizarre traits of his other works, his cosmic works are also somewhat strange, as they include a football stadium, thousands of cubes of frozen cow’s milk or a gigantic human hand that will be sent into space in the distant future. With OSS, Darren Bader thus offers an absurd theatre that can be located somewhere between a fantastic vision of the future, belief in the unlimited possibilities of art and over-ambitious art films. At the same time, with OSS he expands the spectrum of his artistic practice, the complexity of which one has hardly been able to master up to now anyway.

    In addition to OSS, the sound work audio files, also produced especially for the Kölnischer Kunstverein, opens up new categories within Darren Bader’s oeuvre: On 32 loudspeakers, Bader presents almost simultaneously hundreds of pieces of music relating to the Old Testament, his credit card number, Hegel’s dialectic, noble gases or the ingredients of a Linzer Torte, among other things. The result of this unusual interplay is a deafening roar that turns the recipient’s head with immense force and perhaps gives an inkling of the noise that arises when Darren Bader, with a great deal of humour, brings down the boundary walls between Conceptual Art, Surrealism and other art forms.

2014
  • Solo Exhibition: Annette Kelm – Staub, 7.11. – 21.12.2014
    Annette Kelm, Staub, Kölnischer Kunstverein 2014, Installation view, photo: Simon Vogel

    Opening: Thursday, 6 November 2014, 7 pm
    Exhibition: 7 November – 21 December 2014

    Annette Kelm was born in Stuttgart in 1975 and is among the most outstanding female representatives of a younger guard of photographers who have drawn international attention through a new perspective on the world. With her individual photos and series depicting arrangements of everyday objects, portraits, architecture and landscapes or seemingly unusual narratives, Kelm creates images which she uses not only to expose how our perception and our vision function, but also to reflect upon cultural and sociopolitical topics.

    In spite of the conceptual components that characterise the artist’s work, these photographs are defined by a subtle – but simultaneously touching – emotionality and temperament which make them into fascinating and lastingly resonant images.

    At the Kölnischer Kunstverein, particular emphasis will be placed on the artist’s work during the last five years, which will be presented through a representative selection of works, some of which will be shown publicly for the first time.

    A publication will be published on the occasion of the exhibition.

    Guided Tours through the exhibition:

    19 November, 5 pm with Moritz Wesseler
    17 December, 5 pm with Carla Donauer

    Supported by:

  • Solo Exhibition: Andra Ursuta – Scytheseeing, 28.6. – 30.9.2014
    Andra Ursuta, Scythseeing, Kölnischer Kunstverein 2014, Installation view, photo: Uli Holz

    The apparently mummified body of a woman, threatening scythes, models of the artist’s parents’ house, deformed concrete bunkers, inflatable fists made of cloth or anthropomorphic obelisks – the work of Andra Ursuta, who was born in Salonta (Romania) in 1979 and lives in New York, consists primarily of sculptures and installations that take on their unsettling and haunting effect through their dark, sometimes morbid or martial symbolism as well as their allusions to past and present systems of power and violence.

    The points of departure for Ursuta’s works are usually provided by personal experiences and memories connected with her Eastern European roots, the cultural codes of Romania and her family history. The artist links these with impressions from the present and with current topics. Images and ideas that have etched themselves into the collective consciousness or into the artist’s own individual consciousness take on a new existence in these works – one that is disconcerting and sometimes disturbing for viewers. At the same time, her works are in no way conceived in terms of provocations; instead, they are full of art historical and cultural historical references. A seemingly uprooted column of wood constructed of rhomboidal elements and featuring a deadly tip stirs memories not only of Constantin Brâncuși’s La colonne sans fin (Endless column), 1918–1938, but also of the brutal atrocities of the Romanian ruler Vlad III – Drăculea, who indulged his taste for execution by impalement in the mid 15th century, during the struggle of resistance against the Ottoman Empire. Through its coating in black rubber, the object entitled Ass to Mouth is additionally provided with sexual connotations, resulting in an oscillation between very different perceptual possibilities.

    In Ursuta’s works the exploration of the human psyche and its emotions, yearnings and obsessions as well as fears and nightmares finds an echo that is no less direct than that of her own biography, social role models and cultural conventions.

    With Scytheseeing Kölnischer Kunstverein is presenting not only Andra Ursuta’s first institutional solo exhibition in Germany, but also the most comprehensive survey of the artist’s work to be shown to date in Europe: in addition to a group of pieces created specifically for the exhibition, Ursuta is exhibiting a selection of works which make it possible to grasp the development of her artistic body of work in recent years.

    Ursuta has recently participated in the 55th Venice Biennale (2013) and group exhibitions at MoMA PS1 (2013) and in New York’s New Museum (2011) as well as through solo exhibitions at Milan’s Peep-Hole (2014) and at Los Angeles’s Hammer Museum (2014).

    Tours of the exhibition: 2 July, 5pm, with Moritz Wesseler, and 6 August, 5pm, with Carla Donauer

  • Solo Exhibition: Uri Aran – Sensitivo, 28.6. – 30.9.2014
    Uri Aran, Sensitivo, Kölnischer Kunstverein, 2014,

    Research into language and communication, as well as the examination of interpersonal relationships, form a substantial point of departure in the work of the artist Uri Aran, who was born in Jerusalem in 1977 and now lives in New York. However, the Israeli’s works are in no way to be confused with scientific studies; they can instead be related to poetic or philosophical thought experiments that have found expression in the form of installations, sculptures, drawings and films. Through a selection of films, the presentation in the Kölnischer Kunstverein will provide the first presentation of Aran’s work to a broader public in Germany.

    Films:

    Unitled, 2006, 03:24 Min.

    Mud, 2010, 07:40 Min.

    Uncle in Jail, 2012, 21:03 Min.

  • Solo Exhibition: Claus Richter – Höchst seltsame Chronologie verschiedenster Ereignisse des Kölnischen Kunstvereins der Jahre 1839 bis 1914, 28.6. – 30.9.2014
    Claus Richter, Höchst seltsame Chronologie verschiedenster Ereignisse des Kölnischen Kunstvereins der Jahre 1839 bis 1914, Installation view Kölnischer Kunstverein, 2014, photo: Simon Vogel

    What did the members of the Kölnischer Kunstverein smell like in the 19th century? Was one of the institution’s chairmen of the board featured in a puppet theatre? What is the story behind the flag of the Kunstverein?

    To mark the 175th anniversary of the founding of the Kölnischer Kunstverein, the Cologne artist Claus Richter (b.1971 in Lippstadt) has developed a unique project: based on ingeniously spun tall tales, it presents a humorous and unpredictable homage both to the institution and to the local region and customs of the Rhineland. Under the title Höchst seltsame Chronologie (Thoroughly Peculiar Chronicle), the project brings together diverse events from the history of the Kölnischer Kunstverein during the years 1839 to 1914 in the form of a total of ten objects designed specifically for the occasion and ranging from a Kunstverein flask of the renowned Eau de Cologne to a puppet figure caricaturing the chairman of the board from around the turn of the century to the art association’s flag, which has been preserved in the Church of the Apostles for decades. In keeping with the multi-layered nature of the themes dealt with, the pieces designed by Claus Richter can be seen at various public places around the city, with the exhibition thus becoming a kind of stroll through Cologne and its history. As a part of the exhibition, a special artist’s book and regularly scheduled tours will serve to present the project, which indubitably represents one of the most charming highlights of the 175th anniversary celebration of the Kölnischer Kunstverein.

    Guided Tours:
    Sunday, 14 September 2014, 3 – 4.30 pm
    Sunday, 28 September 2014, 3 – 4.30 pm

    The video of the lecture performance of Claus Richter from the opening night on 29 August 2014: HERE

    Special Thanks to:
    Museum Ludwig Köln
    Kölnisches Stadtmuseum
    MAKK
    Duftmuseum des Farina Hauses
    St. Aposteln
    Karnevalsmuseum Köln

    This project is supported by:

  • Exhibition: Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg – Maybe This Is A Dream, 9.4. – 1.6.2014
    Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg, Maybe this is a dream, Photo: Petter Cohen

    Opening: 8 April 2014, 7 pm

    Sound performance by Hans Berg: 8 April, beginning at 9:30 pm

    The artist duo of Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg (b.1978,Sweden) have achieved international prominence with their haunting animated films and they were awarded a Lion at the Venice Biennale of 2009. In their exhibition at the Kölnischer Kunstverein they will be showing a selection of cinematic works as well as large-format sculptures.

    The films are created using stop-motion animation and, to date, they have made up the majority of the two artists’ work. They typically feature figures moulded in clay, which are formally reminiscent of the world of children’s films. With their content and storylines, however, the films conjure up sometimes bizarre dream and nightmare worlds. The elementary questions of human existence – revolving around love, power and violence – provide the themes of these film works.

    In contrast, their most recent work – The Black Pot, which is at the centre of theCologneexhibition – gets along without any array of figures and displays almost abstract tendencies. The animated film is based on drawings, presents the continually repeating process of the emergence, change and disintegration of forms and thus plays on the various cycles of nature and the universe.

    As in the duo’s previous animated films, the moving images are accompanied by electronic music composed specifically for them by Hans Berg.

    In the Kölnischer Kunstverein the film works will be complemented by large doughnut and ice-cream sculptures, which will take over and transform the main hall.

    The exhibition has enjoyed the generous support of the Düsseldorf collector Julia Stoschek, who has already been devoting attention to the two artists for several years.

  • Solo Exhibition: Pietro Roccasalva – F.E.S.T.A., 8.2. – 23.3.2014
    Pietro Roccalasva, announcement for the exhibition F.E.S.T.A at the Kölnischer Kunstverein 2014

    Exhibition opening: 7 February 2014, 7 pm

    Exhibition: 8 February – 23 March 2014

    The Kölnischer Kunstverein is pleased to present F.E.S.T.A., the Italian artist Pietro Roccasalva’s first solo exhibition in a German public institution. The show comprises both older and recent works by Roccasalva and provides a cross section of the different areas in which the artist works.

    For over ten years the Italian artist Pietro Roccasalva has been developing a body of work that is difficult to define and can be seen as one of the most resolute contributions to contemporary art. His oeuvre is characterised by its diversity of media. On the one hand, it encompasses paintings and drawings that demonstrate a remarkable technical ability and sometimes display strong similarities to the icons of Old Masters. On the other hand, he also creates sculptures, installations, photographs and films as well as performances, which can be much more readily understood in terms of the contemporary discourse on art. The connection between these different areas of his work is formed by way of the content and narratives on which the works are based and whose origins lie in the conceptual cosmos of the artist. Roccasalva intertwines personal experiences with references to art history, literature and music as well as cinema in such a way that it is not uncommon for the works to shift between various levels of reality and fiction.

    At the same time, the artist’s works are linked together in an unusual way: every work that Roccasalva creates makes reference to its immediate predecessor as well as the work that follows it. In a certain sense, the artist’s present oeuvre functions like an enormous house of mirrors, and the labyrinth seems to be furnished more than occasionally with concave and distorting mirrors. A secret is bound up within the work of Roccasalva, one that resists any revelation and thus makes a lasting mark on viewers’ memories.

    Roccasalva has attracted international attention through his participation in the 53rd Venice Biennale and his contribution to Manifesta 7; most recently, the artist’s work was shown in a comprehensive solo show in Le MAGASIN, Grenoble.

    Sundays at 5 pm, presentation of the 35 mm film Truka (D’après Andreij Rublëv by A. Tarkovsky)

    Exhibition tours: 19 February (Carla Donauer) and 19 March (Moritz Wesseler) at 5 pm.

2013
  • Solo Exhibition: Sean Snyder – No Apocalypse, Not Now, 9.11. – 22.12.2013
    Sean Snyder, No Apocalypse, Not now, Kölnischer Kunstverein 2013, Installation view

    Sean Snyder was born in 1972 in Virginia Beach in the United States of America and studied at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, at Boston University in Boston and at the Städelschule in Frankfurt. Since the mid-1990s, Snyder has developed a body of work that revolves around the creation, meaning and perception of information, images and codes and appears in the form of films, texts and installations.

    At the Kölnischer Kunstverein, Snyder’s work is now being presented in a comprehensive manner for the first time in Germany. In the exhibition No Apocalypse, Not Now, whose title refers directly to Jacques Derrida’s eponymous work on nuclear end-time visions and the politics of deterrence, thirteen coordinated works provide a deeper insight into the artist’s practice.

    The exhibition covers not only the central pavilion of the building, whose windows were fitted with walls especially for the project, but also the basement and the cinema hall. In the Kunstverein’s large exhibition pavilion, visitors are confronted with a total of ten film works. These works not only cover a substantial period of ten years, they also represent a central part of Snyder’s artistic work and provide a basic understanding of his practice and approach.

    Snyder uses a wide variety of source material as the basis of his work, ranging from news, advertising, entertainment or amateur clips to information from public or government databases, sequences from private blogs and even self-produced images. Snyder extracts and sifts this material, subjects it to systematic investigation and taps it for its meaning and how it came about. In this way, the artist reveals and questions the mechanisms of information and image production in today’s global media world, without, however, making any judgements. The thematic fields he touches on in the course of his work encompass central questions and events of the recent past as well as the present. The relationship between images and ideologies as well as social and political systems form the artist’s overarching field of interest and research.

    The cinematic works in the exhibition pavilion are shown on so-called Hantarex monitors, which, in accordance with Snyder’s artistic concept, are placed on pedestals in the room and thus, in a certain way, are combined to form an installative arrangement. The arrangement of the monitors is not hierarchical and follows the chronology of the works, with the eldest being placed at the beginning and the youngest at the end of the hall. The soundtracks accompanying the film sequences of some of the works are not coordinated with each other, so that they partly overlap.

    The artist’s films are supplemented by photographs and prints, which are installed on the front walls of the hall. These works are part of Snyders Index, a project begun in 2008 that involves the systematic recording of his archive of images and data accumulated over the years for the production of the films. The aim of this undertaking is to make all his material publicly available on the Internet, while the physical sources are destroyed as a result of the transformation processes. In the context of Sean Snyder’s ongoing preoccupation with the creation and transfer of information and images, the process involved in the creation of Index can in a sense be seen as a logical consequence of his work. The films presented in the exhibition relate to the archive of images and information incorporated in Index like essences that do not necessarily mark a higher value, but rather a different manifestation.

    In contrast, the photographs and prints on display represent physical products of Snyder’s preoccupation with the Index, which in this context became the starting point for entirely new works. These show, for example, storage media that the artist used for the archive and which are recorded in the manner of factual documentary photographs. Other results of the index, in turn, show close-ups and details of objects from the archive that are no longer decipherable and therefore seem quite abstract.

    While the works presented in the exhibition pavilion are directly or indirectly related to Index, the works in the basement and cinema are to be viewed independently of this project. These films, which are Exhibition (2008) and Afghanistan, circa 1985 (2008 – 09), were made when Snyder had already begun work on Index and were therefore separated from the works in the pavilion. The film exhibition in the basement is based on a Soviet documentary from the 1960s and shows an exhibition of reproductions of various works of art in a Ukrainian village. On the one hand, the work addresses the ideological content of the source material used for the film and, on the other hand, provides a reflection on the institutional character of museums. In contrast, Afghanistan, circa 1985, shows the viewer an encounter between local Afghans and Soviet troops. The work is based on film footage taken during the Soviet occupation of the country in the 1970s and 1980s. At first, a sequence is played back without interruption or change, only to be recapitulated again in a slowed-down form, so to speak image by image. In this way, Sean Snyder not only succeeds in making the formulas and conventions of the representation of power of both cultural spheres comprehensible, but also in once again presenting the function and effect of images in the media age. The thematic relevance as well as the meticulousness and precision associated with Afghanistan, circa 1985 – and with the other works as well – can probably be regarded as one of the essential characteristics of Sean Snyder’s artistic practice and contribute significantly to the fact that his works have a long lasting resonance.

    A catalogue will be published to accompany the exhibition.

    Exhibition opening hours:

    Tuesday – Sunday 11 – 18 h, closed on public holidays

    With the friendly support of:

    Stiftung Kunst und Soziales der Sparda-Bank West (Jahrespartner 2013)
    Kunststiftung NRW
    RheinEnergieStiftung Kultur
    Stadt Köln

  • Solo Exhibition: Ceal Floyer, 6.9. – 20.10.2013
    Ceal Floyer, Kölnischer Kunstverein 2013, Installation view

    The Berlin-based artist Ceal Floyer, who has attracted international attention in recent years with her astute and mostly poetic conceptual art, is presenting a site-specific exhibition at the Kölnischer Kunstverein that not only reflects the special architectural conditions of the building, but also provides an insight into her artistic practice.

    The intervention that Ceal Floyer has made in the large exhibition hall of the Kölnischer Kunstverein seems quite comprehensive, even if the means for it actually seem rather minimal. Countless stickers of black bird silhouettes, as we know them from the glazed facades of public buildings, have been installed on the pavilion’s large windows. They are the shadowy outlines of buzzards, which are supposed to protect real birds from flying against the transparent panes by their deterrent effect. Contrary to the usual installation method, which provides for sporadic placement of the stickers, the buzzards are placed close together in the context of Ceal Floyer’s 2002 work Warning Birds – which is the central work of the exhibition. The view through the glass panes is restricted to such an extent that the windows can hardly fulfill their actual function. Due to their specific placement, the birds almost have an ornamental character, which occasionally distracts from the fact that the work also evokes memories of the well-known attack scenes from Alfred Hitchcock’s classic The Birds in a haunting way. By changing familiar parameters, Floyer achieves a fundamental shift in meaning that allows for a wide range of associations, even if the work, as its title suggests, shows nothing but warning birds

    The subliminal humour, which can be understood in the work through the seemingly absurd increase in the Warning Birds’ commission, is combined with a large number of Floyer’s works, so that it can almost be seen as a characteristic of her practice. This particular form of humor also characterizes the 1999 work Bucket, which Floyer deliberately integrated into the context of the Warning Birds’ expansive installation. The work consists of an ordinary black bucket, which seems quite surprising and perhaps even a little out of place within the exhibition, so that uncertainty creeps in as to whether the container was left behind by mistake. At regular intervals, a sound becomes perceptible that is reminiscent of the constant dripping of a water leak. Inevitably, the observer’s gaze is directed towards the hall ceiling where the leak could be suspected. However, there are no indications of water damage in this area. The explanation for the unusual noise is ultimately found inside the bucket. A portable CD player and a box are arranged in this bucket, which produce the irritating sound. None of the devices is hidden and the conditions for the illusion are thus immediately apparent.

    Even though Floyer’s work refers to the tradition of deception, which has long been anchored in art history, it seems to contradict it in a certain way. Her work creates an illusion in order to reveal its foundations in the next moment and to dissolve them again.

    The work Rock Paper Scissors, created in 2013 and complementing the Bucket within the installation Warning Birds, which functions as a framework, so to speak, manages without any tricks of deception. The work consists of three square picture panels, each showing a rock, a paper and a pair of scissors, thus referring to the widespread game of the same name, in which the hands are used to reproduce the various signs. The work is based on images that Floyer did not produce himself, but rather as found footage, as found material simply adopted. The three motifs that make up the work illustrate on the one hand the title of the work and on the other hand refer to the system of signs and meanings linked to real objects, with which rules and actions are connected in the world of play. The simultaneous visibility of all three objects contradicts the conditions of the game and thus calls into question the connection between real objects and the sign system behind them, so that the work can also be read as a still life. Floyer’s Rock Paper Scissors thus revolves around the relationship between language, signs and images.

    But Ceal Floyer’s exhibition at the Kölnischer Kunstverein does not begin in the pavilion of the Riphahn building. As soon as visitors enter the building’s large and bright entrance doors, they are greeted by a soft, but thoroughly atmospheric music that draws them to the cinema’s double doors. In the darkened auditorium he is then confronted with Floyer’s film work Untitled Credit Roll, made in 2013, which in a way gives the visitor the impression of having arrived late for a screening. White, abstract and partly cloud-like formations and shapes slowly run from the lower to the upper edge of the screen and, in interaction with the music, refer to the classic credits of a film. The lettering, names and functional designations are blurred and can no longer be read, so that one could suspect that the lens of the film projector has been misaligned. The often overlooked end of a film screening, where many viewers have already left the cinema auditorium, is brought to the fore by the artist as part of the work and elevated to the status of an actual attraction.

    Floyer reverses the meaning of things and directs attention from a major to a minor matter. The sophistication and ingenuity she displays in this process proves the artist to be a master of her profession and justifies the special quality of her diverse practice.

    A catalogue will be published to accompany the exhibition.

    Exhibition opening hours:

    Tuesday to Sunday 11 – 18 h, Mondays and public holidays closed

    With the friendly support of:
    Stiftung Kunst und Soziales der Sparda-Bank West (Jahrespartner 2013)
    RheinEnergieStiftung Kultur
    Stadt Köln

  • Solo Exhibition: Stefan Müller – Allerliebste Tante Polly, 18.4. – 2.6.2013
    Stefan Müller, Penny Lane, 2013. Foto: Albrecht Fuchs Courtesy Galerie Nagel Draxler, BerlinKöln & Galerie Bärbel Grässlin, Frankfurt a.M.

    At first glance, Stefan Müller’s works appear abstract. Roughly defined rectangles, often casually painted, fluctuate in unstable relationships through a painterly space of bleach, splashes and colour gradients. In other pictures, countless folds, created by the batik technique, break up the colour-impregnated canvas into a spectrum of vein-shaped lines. The background of the picture is reminiscent of the nebulous images of galaxies streaked with milk roads or distant mountains on faded pages of an atlas. Against this background, traces and recesses often dance, which are caused by adhesive tape, dirt, crumbs or ash residue – deliberately included in the priming process with imponderables that have been incorporated. The artist follows these coincidences, allowing himself to be guided or deterred by them in the setting of new shades and forms, correcting or even emphasizing them. Then there are again places where oily inner surfaces – soaked up by nettle cloth – run as an entourage of pastose luminous colour applications. Curls overlap and cut through each other until their acrylic and bleach streaks unfold uncleanly intertwining suction effects. Some of these forms can be read as references to other painterly discourses. Thus, the curls described are partly reminiscent of Kenneth Noland’s target motifs or of Poul Gernes, but as if they were heavily washed out and slipped. However, the recognition of references and quotations is not decisive for reading Stefan Müller’s painting. This painting is not a lecture about painting. It is more interesting to look at Stefan Müller’s handling of canvas, paint, material and technique less abstractly and more as a concrete examination of longings, relationships, one’s own experience and the everyday search for transcendence. Lines and figures, for example, whose colours flicker during their vague progression, associate states of mind. Or there are colored stripes from which drippings are released, which in turn cross and recolor other underlying colored stripes and thereby change themselves; like people who meet other people. Elsewhere, crayon lines condense into spirals that circle around themselves like thoughts that lead to no conclusion. Again and again, the artist falls back on forms of experience that were taken for granted in childhood, but whose use was then lost at some point on the long road to adulthood; processes that exist outside the logic of being too something to use. Thus there is the beautiful title of an older painting from 2002, which explains this simply: “Looking too long into the sun”. The abstractly painted circles in the picture are recognized by the title as something absolutely concrete and simple, as reflections on the retina; an experience that is both personal and at the same time shareable with others. Through his almost romantic insistence on the simple yet fragile connection between personal and aesthetic experience, between experiencing and sharing, Müller has succeeded in keeping his work out of the tricks and feints of post-conceptual painting assertions symptomatic of the noughties without becoming solipsistic.

    Søren Grammel
    (Curator of the exhibition)

    The exhibition is supported by:
    Land NRW – Ministerium für Familie, Kinder, Jugend, Kultur und Sport
    Stadt Köln
    Stiftung Kunst und Soziales der Sparda-Bank West (Jahrespartner 2013)
    Rhein Energie Stiftung Kultur

  • Solo Exhibition: Thea Djordjadze – november, 16.2. – 31.3.2013
    Thea Djordjadze, november, Kölnischer Kunstverein, 2013, Installation view, Courtesy Galerie Sprüth Magers, Photo: Albrecht Fuchs

    Thea Djordjadze was born in 1971 in Tbilisi, Georgia. She studied sculpture in the class of Rosemarie Trockel at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. From 2004 to 2007 she was a studio scholarship holder of the Kœlnischer Kunstverein. Now the Kunstverein presents her first institutional solo exhibition in Germany since 5 years. As is often the case at the Kunstverein, it is a specific new production that is unmistakable and arises in direct confrontation with the location.

    A recurring element of many of Thea Djordjadze’s works are slender wooden or steel profile constructions. The struts, which change direction and length several times, are reminiscent of axonometric drawings. They are geometric figures whose straight lines and angles have been broken up and twisted. Their contours suggest unfinished surfaces and volumes. Sometimes they give the impression of strangely folded outlines of various furnishings. The structures work in combination with objects made of wood, clay, papier-mâché and other materials. In addition, there are carpets or pieces of carpet, glass panes or cut-to-size panels. The fragments are connected by loose procedures such as placing, laying and leaning. They are speculative, temporary arrangements. Their painting seems to be provisional. For example, when thinly mixed plaster or undiluted wall paint is applied to soft material such as foam or carpet.
    Djordjadze’s sculptures are partly reminiscent of the spatial folds of the Russian Futurists or the De Stijl Group, but again they are clearly distinguished from them by biomorphic, sometimes surreal, sometimes folkloristic-looking design elements. Added to this is an almost narrative approach to the interior as a motif: chair, table, bed, screen. The artist perceives the visual starting material for her ensembles in the design and architecture of the environments she travels through or uses. The family context in Georgia and her travel activities as an internationally exhibited artist living in Berlin provide the topographical coordinates of this reception. It is heterogeneous spatial concepts whose experience interests the artist. Situations in which use, improvisation and the clash of diverse, often contradictory cultural practices play a role. Djordjadze transplants images and objects out of the context of their original function and appearance and transfers them into the speculative environment of her own artistic work. Cultural reality and contradictions – which are represented as normality in the source material – are dissolved and renegotiated in this process.

    Modernism appears in Thea Djordjadze’s work as a construction whose universalistic claim has always been relativized by the plurality of cultural and geographical exchange relationships. On the occasion of her exhibition at the Kunsthalle Basel (2009), the artist showed the film “The Salt of Swanetia” by Mikhail Kalatosov in a cinema. The film documents the clash of modernization and archaic in the post-revolutionary Soviet Republic of Georgia. Soviet filmmakers wanted to bring the socialist perspective – also in terms of visual language – to the southern edges of the young soviet republic, which were marked by patriarchal traditions. Conversely, however, the film language of the young revolutionaries was also changed by the existing social and geographical structures. A similar relationship is reflected in Djordjadze’s work when she lays a folkloristic fringed carpet over an axonometric wooden construction. The ornamentation of the carpet is also relativized. The ornamental side of the carpet is folded inwards; the unintentionally modern-looking back, which is mechanistic due to the manufacturing process, remains visible.

    Søren Grammel, Curator of the exhibition

    Friday 15 February 2013
    from 7 pm Opening of the exhibition
    from 8 pm concert
    Alfons Knogl with Daniel Ansorge & Holger Otten
    The World In Pieces
    afterwards party with DJ Korkut Elbay

    The exhibition is supported by:
    Stiftung Kunst, Kultur und Soziales der Sparda-Bank West, Jahrespartner 2013
    and
    Kunststiftung NRW

2012
  • Exhibition: Janice Kerbel, Hilary Lloyd, Silke Otto-Knapp, 3.11.2012 – 6.1.2013
    Janice Kerbel, Hilary Lloyd, Silke Otto-Knapp, Kölnischer Kunstverein, 2012, Installation view

    Janice Kerbel, Hilary Lloyd and Silke Otto-Knapp are three outstanding solo artists whose work has increasingly attracted widespread international attention during the past few years. British artist Hilary Lloyd (*1964) was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2011. This year she has been showing her work in a solo show at the Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Basel. Canadian artist Janice Kerbel (*1970) has recently had a solo show at the Chisenhale Gallery in London and has featured in the Art Now-Programme at Tate Britain. German artist Silke Otto-Knapp (*1970) has exhibited her work at the Berkeley Art Museum (US) and at greengrassi gallery London.

    The three artists will set their very different artistic practices in relation to one another and combine painting, film and conceptual art in a joint exhibition design. A recurring motif of the exhibition will be the exploration of the relations between references of content in the respective artistic production and the dramaturgic as well as stylistic means of their staging.
    A characteristic feature of the artists’ work is the investigative and inquiring approach they take to the material they work with, and its respective dispositions, linked with a particularly strong assertion and examination of the visual. In their work, visuality manifests itself as an instrument of association and emotion which – perhaps because of its particular ambivalence and the room for interpretation it leaves – is congenial to reflecting on different cultural spheres of life and knowledge.

    The project has been genereously sponsored by Kunststiftung NRW.

    Our special thanks go to Sadie Coles at Sadie Coles HQ London. Without
    her support the realisation of Hilary Lloyd’s works would not have been
    possible.

    Also many thanks to Scott Cameron Weaver.

    Opening
    Friday, November 2, from 7 pm

    Introduction
    Dr. Wolfgang Strobel
    Chair of the Board Kœlnischer Kunstverein
    and
    Søren Grammel
    Director Kœlnischer Kunstverein

    Party
    DJ Hans Nieswandt
    Friday, November 2, from 10 pm
    A Party with and for all Cologne Contemporaries

    Talks & Events:

    Director’s Tour
    Saturday, November 3, 7 pm
    For Cologne’s Museums at Night

    Director’s Tour
    Tuesday, November 6, 6 pm

    Tour
    Thursday, November 15, 6 pm
    with Marion Rücker

    Tour
    Wednesday, December 19, 6 pm
    with Sofie Mathoi

  • Exhibition: The Big Jahresgaben Exhibition, 29.9. – 10.10.2012

    205 works by 111 artists for purchase
    Editions & Unique Pieces

    For the first time, the exhibition hall of the Kœlnischer Kunstverein will be the showroom and reloading point for a large annual gift exhibition. This year we have expanded our range of products by a particularly high proportion of individual items.
    With Paweł Althamer, Norbert Arns, Atelier & Steven Purvis, Alice Aycock, Mark Bain, Rosa Barba, Merlin Bauer, Maggie Bauer & Michel Sauer, Bernd & Hilla Becher, Boris Becker, Johannes Bendzulla, Joseph Beuys, Heike Beyer, Andri Bischoff, Bernhard Johannes Blume, Thomas Böing, Cosima von Bonin, Manfred Boecker & Wolfgang Niedecken, Wolfgang Breuer, Ruth Buchanan, Liudvikas Buklys, Michael Buthe, Marianna Christofides, Eli Cortiñas, Josef Dabernig, Walter Dahn, Sara Deraedt, Christina Doll, Angus Fairhurst, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Kerstin Fischer, Oskar Fischinger, Olivier Foulon & Willem Oorebeek, Albrecht Fuchs & Das Institut, Douglas Gordon, Thomas Grünfeld, Owen Gump, Thea Gvetadze, Adam Harrison, Lone Haugaard Madsen, Simon Hemmer, Julia Horstmann, Katharina Jahnke, Cameron Jamie, Pernille Kapper Williams, Janice Kerbel, Michael Kerkmann, Viola Klein, Alfons Knogl, Peter Kogler, Běla Kolářová, Bernd Krauß, Adolf Krischanitz, Marie Lund, Ann Mandelbaum, Nick Mauss, Pauline M’barek, Bärbel Messmann, Michaela Meise, Almut Middel, Yugoslav Mitevski, Bernadette Mittrup, Johanna von Monkiewitsch, Alex Morrison, Stefan Müller, Christa Näher, David Ostrowski, Silke Otto-Knapp, Stephen Prina, Florian Pumhösl, Claus Richter, Ulla Rossek, Maruša Sagadin, Gerda Scheepers, Lasse Schmidt Hansen, Frances Scholz, Nora Schultz, Sery C. , Sean Snyder, Stephanie Stein, Monika Stricker, Sarah Szczesny, Sofie Thorsen, Rosemarie Trockel, Franz Erhard Walther, Lawrence Weiner, Nicole Wermers, Christoph Westermeyer, Johannes Wohnseifer, Heimo Zobernig
    Support: Salon Verlag (Ed. Gerhard Theewen) featuring Edition Ex Libris with Thomas Demand, Marcel Dzama, Marcel van Eeden, Candida Höfer, Thomas Huber, Jack Pierson, Peter Piller, Gregor Schneider, Norbert Schwontkowski, Thomas Struth, Wolfgang Tillmans, Gert & Uwe Tobias, Rosemarie Trockel, Rachel Whiteread.

    All works of art shown can be purchased during the exhibition by members of the Kœlnischer Kunstverein as well as non-members (for a small surcharge).

    Buyers can also order in the online shop using the form:
    Open the menu JAHRESGABEN.

    We respectfully thank the participating artists with whom all prizes are shared. All income that the Kœlnischer Kunstverein generates through the annual gift exhibition will be used for the production of future exhibitions. Purchase art at preferential prices and at the same time support the most relevant association in Cologne for the production and exhibition of contemporary art.

    New opening hours
    Tuesday to Friday, 11 to 19 hrs
    Saturday & Sunday, 11 to 18 o’clock

    On 3 October the exhibition will be open from 11am to 6pm.

  • Solo Exhibition: Bernd Krauß – Das ist heute möglich, 30.6. – 9.9.2012
    Bernd Krauß, Das ist heute möglich, Kölnischer Kunstverein 2012, Installation view, Detail: Magiccan 2003

    Opening on Friday June 29, 19 pm

    In his work Bernd Krauß uses techniques ranging from painting, drawing and sculpture to video, photography, printing, performance and theatre. In addition he pursues various long-term projects such as the production of a magazine not dissimilar to printed advertisement circulars. The magazine with the tabloidesque title “Der Riecher” is reproduced using copy shops and the internet. Krauß continuously absorbs the everyday around him and uses this material for his objects, performances and pictures as well as for his own improvised TV channel (“Channel Middle Franconia”).

    His use of formats not specific to art practice and his preference for everyday forms of action is characteristic of his work as much as the distance he consciously keeps to the type of expert artists, who, by repetition attain mastery in their specific technique and spread it throughout the art system. By contrast Krauß adopts the attitude of a Hobbyist-As-Professional, who is not constrained by the usual operating principles – for example when he works as a volunteer at a zoo in the north of Sweden or delves into betting on harness races.
    In his polyglot and multi-formatted installations casually set gestures and an unconventional formalism condense into unpredictable spaces of projection.

    Bernd Krauß lives and works in Stockholm.

  • Exhibition: A wavy line is drawn across the middle of the original plans, 19.4. – 10.6.2012
    Installation view: A wavy line is drawn across the middle of the original plans, Detail: Sara Deraedt.

    Chantal Akerman, Ruth Buchanan, Liudvikas Buklys, Saim Demircan, Sara Deraedt, _fabrics interseason (Wally Salner, Johannes Schweiger), Lasse Schmidt Hansen, Benjamin Hirte, Marie Lund, David Maljkovic, Michaela Meise, Nicole Wermers, Heimo Zobernig.

    The works in the exhibition are made primarily of simple building materials. They reflect everyday use. Their view of the world is without transcendence. They contrast the sublimity of minimalism with their pure physicality. Their source is the building kit, of which normality is constructed. At the level of reference, some of the works refer to semi-public or private spaces, as they provide contexts oriented to meaning for the construction of identity. The shifts that distinguish the works from their functional models can be minimal and yet convey skepticism. If the policeman says, “Stop, don’t move!”, the exhibition wonders what a carpet in a building has to say.

    The exhibition is interested in the link between the built environment and the ideas and programs formulated through it. Every product of formal design embodies the utopia of a space, in which it can appear in an ideal way. This abstractly planned space is always a political space at the same time, which defines certain orders and identities. This perspective also draws the gaze to the aspect of authority in both artistic and architectural productions, which became visible in the 20th century as the ambivalence of Modernism between emancipation and control, between empowerment and rationalization.

    Søren Grammel, Curator of the exhibition

    The project was supported by ‘Kunsten en Erfgoed’.

    (The exhibitions title is a sentence borrowed from the text Open Display For Particular Viewership by Ruth Buchanan.)

2011
  • Solo Exhibition: Omer Fast, 22.10. – 20.12.2011
    Omer Fast, Announcement for the exhibition of the artist at the Kölnischer Kunstverein 2011, Design: Manuel Raeder

    The forthcoming exhibition will be the last of Kathrin Jentjens and Anja Nathan-Dorn as directors of the Kunstverein. In his solo show at Kölnischer Kunstverein Omer Fast will be presenting his new work 5000 Feet is the Best (2011) as well as the three-part video work Nostalgia (2009). Omer Fast (*1972) is well known for film and video works that employ formal strategies of film and TV such as mixing documentary and fictitious material, playing with sound, image, cut and truisms of film history. The plurality of perspectives and voices he integrates into his stories in this way negate the authentic. His films are works on the possibilities and potentials of story-telling.

    5000 Feet is the Best tells a story about pilots of unmanned, American drones who work in container-like offices surrounded by a multitude of computer displays. Technology allows them to discern what make someone’s shoes are or to watch a man smoking his cigarette from the other end of the world – it is a very intimate visual perception, a sensation the pilot also feels when he directs the drone’s missiles to their target. The digital film, which is based on an interview by the artist with a former pilot, mixes documentary material with fictitious elements. The pilot evades the questions of the interviewer time and again and seeks refuge in the recounting of petty anecdotes. The images these stories conjure up in the film blend with our own imaginings of the war in the Middle East and those of Las Vegas. Increasingly, the film focuses on the void between our own media-shaped assumptions and the traumatizing experiences of the pilot.

    A new slide and video work by Omer Fast has been installed in the basement of the Kunstverein. Her face was covered (2011) acts like an after-image of 5000 Feet is the Best. The video shows preparations for a film shoot just after a staged bomb explosion. The images were filmed from the top of a crane in order for them to resemble the vantage point of a drone pilot. The voice-over of a drone pilot tells the story of how and why he receives orders to eliminate a woman. For the slide projection Omer Fast looked up phrases from this story in Google images. Some of the images from the search results are absurd and seem to be selected at random; others are a close fit to the actual story. The images are like shadows of the story that seems to uncannily be made up of an everyday image reservoir.

    Nostalgia, a work made in 2009, is a video installation in three parts. Based on an audio recording of a conversation with a refugee from Nigeria a story about illegal immigrants and the tightly controlled border between Africa and Europe develops. Nostalgia consists of a short documentary video, a two-display installation showing a staged interview situation between an African and a director and a science fiction set in the past picturing Europeans fleeing a ruined and insecure Europe for a safe Africa via an underground tunnelling network. Similar to Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness the narrative structure of Nostalgia is build up like a Russian Matrjoschka doll that reveals the planes of narration one by one.
    In the first part of Nostalgia the African interviewed by Omer Fast recounts how, when he was a child soldier, he was taught by a senior soldier to trap partridges. In the subsequent parts of the installation actors acting out different characters describe precisely this laying of the snare trap. The more the viewer penetrates the manifold perspectives and planes of reality the more the snare seems to close in on him.

    We cordially thank Dr. Arend and Dr. Brigitte Oetker, Julia Stoschek, Sabine DuMont Schütte, the embassy of the State of Israel and Koellefolien for the kind support of the exhibition.

  • Exhibition: CHTO DELAT? – Perestroika. Twenty Years After: 2011-1991, 26.8. – 18.9.2011
    Chto Delat? Perestroika. Twenty Years After 2011 - 1991, Announcement of the exhibition at the Kölnischer Kunstverein 2011

    The Russian collective Chto Delat? was formed in 2003 by artists, critics, philosophers and writers from Saint Petersburg and Moscow. They combine political theory, art and activism in their manifold activities. The group’s projects are based on and build around its members’ active participation in and research of the emancipatory potential of individuals and society at large as well as the role of culture in these processes. The name Chto Delat? translates to ‘What is to be done?’ and is based on the title of a novel by Nikolay Chernyshevsky from the 1860s in which the author drew up a minutely detailed plan for the setup of a socialist workers organisation. Vladimir Lenin later borrowed the name for his political concept. Collectivity is an essential element in the work of the group. They rethink the past as well as the present status of the collective as a means for transforming both the production of an artwork as well as its reception.

    The exhibition Perestroika. Twenty years after: 2011-1991 is the first solo show of the internationally renowned artist collective in Germany. Chto Delat?’s works of art are profoundly political in their way of looking at current events and at history from a present perspective. The exhibition reflects the development of Russian society and economy after Perestroika, during which the Russian Federation was founded and the Soviet Union was dissolved in 1991. Drawn up as a reverse historical countdown the exhibition starts with a projection in the cinema of Tower: A Songspiel, produced in 2010. The audience is given an insight into a prominent public discussion in Saint Petersburg around the recent plans of Gazprom, the state-controlled energy company, to build the Okhta Center. The skyscraper would have marred the famous architectural skyline of the historical city of Saint Petersburg which also is listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

    An installation in the exhibition hall brings together text- and drawing billboards as well as video works from different work periods of Chto Delat? and shaped wooden sculptures. The shaped forms seem at first to represent some characters from Russian fairy tales and historical national symbols, but they actually are transformed into their grotesque opposite and become sarcastic allegories of Russian social and political phenomena. Finally the video film Perestroika-Songspiel. The Victory over the Coup (2008) looks back at the moment of the popular uprising and the triumphant victory of the democratic movement over the restorationist coup in August 1991. Although the time was filled with dreams and actions towards building the new society, the experiences of that time are reflected upon from a present perspective.

    The project is realised by Nikolay Oleinikov, Tsaplya (Olga Egorova), Glucklya (Natalia Pershina) and Dmitry Vilensky. Chto Delat? are: Olga Egorova/Tsaplya (artist, Saint Petersburg), Artiom Magun (philosopher, Saint Petersburg), Nikolai Oleinikov (artist, Moscow), Natalia Pershina/Glucklya (artist, Saint Petersburg), Alexei Penzin (philosopher, Moscow), David Riff (art critic, Moscow), Alexander Skidan (poet, critic, Saint Petersburg), Kirill Shuvalov (artist, Saint Petersburg), Oxana Timofeeva (philosopher, Moscow) and Dmitry Vilensky  (artist, Saint Petersburg).

    The collective has taken part in exhibitions in renowned institutions such as the New Museum, New York (2011), the 17th Biennial of Sydney (2010), Principio Potosí, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2010), the Istanbul Biennial (2009) and NBK – Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin (2009). The recent solo shows of the collective were Study, Study and Act again, Moderna galerija, Ljubjana (2011), Between Tragedy and Farce, SMART project space, Amsterdam (2011), The Urgent Need to Struggle, ICA, London (2010) and Chto Delat?, ar/ge kunst, Bolzano (2010). In October 2011 Chto Delat? will show in the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden.

    The exhibition was curated by Robert Bosch scholar of cultural management Anastasia Marukhina.

    Artist Talk
    Sat 27th August 2011, 4 pm
    Anastasia Marukhina and Heike Ander (GLASMOOG) in conversation with Dmitry Vilensky and Olga Egorova/Tsaplya
    School hall at Kunsthochschule für Medien Cologne
    Followed by the opening of the exhibition Museum Songspiel of Chto Delat? in GLASMOOG
    Filzengraben 2, Cologne
    http://glasmoog.khm.de

    The exhibition shows the latest video work by Chto Delat? Museum Songspiel recounts the story of a group of immigrants who seek refuge in a museum in order to escape deportation.
    On the occasion of the show the Chto delat? journal Theatre of accomplices is published in cooperation with GLASMOOG and with the support of Encuentro Internacional de Medellín (MDE11). With a contribution of the commissioned authors: Luis Garcia; Mladen Dolar; Fernanda Carvajal; Keti Chukhrov; Katja Praznik; Ultra red and some on-line texts provided by general intellect.

    The exhibition is organized in cooperation with GLASMOOG at Kunsthochschule für Medien Cologne and with the support of the Robert Bosch Foundation, the European Cultural Foundation, Filmclub 813 and Koellefolien.

  • Solo Exhibition: Stephen Prina – He was but a bad translation, 11.6. – 24.7.2011
    Stephen Prina, He was but a bad translation, Blind No.9, Kölnischer Kunstverein 2011, Installation view, photo: Simon Vogel

    Opening on June,10, 7 pm

    “Honey Suckle – A Color for All Seasons. Courageous. Confident. Vital. A brave new color, for a brave new world. Let the bold spirit of Honeysuckle infuse you, lift you and carry you through the year. It’s a color for every day – with nothing “everyday” about it.” – www.pantone.com

    The entire 1950s building by architect Wilhelm Riphahn, which houses the Kölnischer Kunstverein, will be engaged by the forthcoming Stephen Prina exhibition. Alongside an installation and a series of works that stem from Prina’s occupation with abstract painting the artist will show pieces from the work cycle The Way He Always Wanted It, among these a 35mm film and a video installation, centered around Ford House, Aurora, Illinois by the American architect, painter and composer Bruce Goff. Furthermore, a performance realized in cooperation with students of the Hochschule für Musik und Tanz Köln and the Institut für Neue Musik will be given on selected dates in the theatre hall at the Kunstverein. For the performance a constant drone of a chromatic total will be heard and according to Prina’s specifications two musicians, using different instruments, will perform a duet based on a melody Goff programmed for player piano (pianola).

    Translation processes between various artistic disciplines are key issues for the American artist who in his work continuously refers to other artists, architects, composers or filmmakers of modernity and pop culture. He uses methods of conceptual art in his contemplation of architecture and music or draws on musical and pop-cultural means and perspectives for painting. Herein he anticipates misunderstandings and disappointments which flawed and incomplete translation processes of cultural codes trigger in the audience. At the same time he firmly involves the spectator by his fascination with visual details and precise spatial settings. As suggested by the title He was but a bad translation. the artist includes himself in this game.

    Due to his incessant development of conceptual and pop-cultural working methods Stephen Prina has since the 1980s become a pulse generating artist for the international art scene, and especially for Cologne, where for the first time he will be honoured with an institutional solo show at the Kölnischer Kunstverein. Stephen Prina was born 1954 in Galesburg, Illinois. He lives and works in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Los Angeles.

    Filmscreening, cinema at Die Brücke, daily at 4.30 pm

    Music performance, theatre hall at Die Brücke

    Cooperation with the Hochschule für Musik und Tanz Köln and the Institut für Neue Musik

    Concert
    Stephen Prina and the Ensemble Garage

    Concerto for Modern, Movie, and Pop Music for Ten Instruments and Voice
    European premiere, world premiere in a revised version, 2011
    Wed 29th June 2011, 8 pm

    A cooperation project by ON – Neue Musik Köln and the Kölnischer Kunstverein, Stephen Prina and the Ensemble Garage will present the Concerto for Modern, Movie and Pop Music by Stephen Prina in the theatre hall at the Kölnischer Kunstverein.
    Beside his artistic career Prina received a musical education and has since the 1990s been a member of the experimental pop music band The Red Krayola. The Concerto for Ten Instruments and Voice which premiered in 2010 in St. Louis is based on the Concerto OP24 by Anton Webern but interjects the individual movements of the concerto with pop songs and compositions by Stephen Prina. Prina himself will sing and play the guitar. Akin to his other artistic works Prina bases the concert on a key composition of modernity and shows its influence on pop music.

  • Exhibition: Bela Kolarova & Lucie Stahl, 14.4. – 29.5.2011
    Bela Kolarova, Vegetage Zyklus Pfirsichstein 1961

    in cooperation with the Stadtgalerie Schwaz

    Opening April the 13, 2011, 7 pm

    Prague-based artist Bela Kolarova (1923-2010) began experimenting with photographic techniques in the early 1960s, creating photograms and X-ray photographs that continued the Bauhaus tradition of photography as an abstract medium. Thus, for a series of photograms she called vegetages, she produced miniature “artificial negatives” by pressing natural materials into soft paraffin and using them for the exposure of the photographic paper instantaneously as “negatives”.

    Despite its formal similarities with avant-garde experimentation, Kolarova´s work has only gained international attention in the last few years. The exhibition at Kölnischer Kunstverein provides a comprehensive overview of Kolarova’s oeuvre, featuring around 40 of her works, ranging from early examples such as the X-ray photographs and vegetage photograms to her more explicitly feminist works, such as drawings made using make-up, a series of assemblages of knots of hair and the very personal collages from the 1970s and 1980s. husband was denied permission to return home after a grant had allowed him to stay. In recent years, Kolarova’s work was featured at the documenta 12 (2007), at the Raven Row gallery in London (2010) and in solo shows at the Museum Kampa in Prague (2008) and Muzeum Umìní in Olomouc (2007).

    The Kölnischer Kunstverein is showing Kolarova’s works together with those of Lucie Stahl (*1977), which possess certain formal similarities despite the fact that they were produced much later and under very different conditions. Lucie Stahl uses a contemporary photographic technique for her poster-like works, arranging mundane objects such as spices, ties, women’s magazines and wheel rims on a scanner and then encases the resulting inkjet prints in polyurethane like distant objects. The works are annotated with brief text fragments in which Stahl humorously provides her subjective perspective on social and political events and on the competitiveness between artists and the almost-hysterical hype that characterises the art world. Her aphoristic commentary is reminiscent of the language of American stand-up comedy, with short anecdotes in rapid succession and witticisms, recounted as if in a soliloquy, that relate awkward or embarrassing situations, pointed observations on society and her own and others’ comments. The juxtaposition of the texts and the spontaneously reproduced iconic objects creates a tension that has a distancing effect.

    Lucie Stahl lives and works in Vienna. She is represented by the Dépendance gallery in Brussels and Galerie Meyer Kainer in Vienna. Her work has been featured in solo shows at the Kunstverein Nürnberg (2009), the Dépendance gallery in Brussels (2005 and 2008), the Michael Neff gallery in Frankfurt (2007), and at the Flaca in London (2005). She has also participated in exhibitions at the Temporary Gallery Cologne (2009), the Croy Nielsen gallery in Berlin (2008), and at kjubh in Cologne (2004). Alongside her work as an artist, Lucie Stahl also manages the Pro Choice gallery space in Vienna in conjunction with Will Benedict.

    This exhibition was organised in cooperation with Stadtgalerie Schwaz. An artist’s book by Lucie Stahl will be published to accompany the exhibition featuring an essay by Chris Kraus, among others.The exhibition of work by Bela Kolarova and Lucie Stahl was made possible by funding from the Czech-German Fund For The Future, the Schroubek Fonds, Munich, and the Karin Abt-Straubinger Stiftung. We would also like to thank the Seilern Collection in Vienna, Werkladen in Cologne, Artex Art Services, Ulrike Remde, Kurt and Claudia von Storch, Koellefolien and Filmclub 813 for their support.

  • Solo Exhibition: Der Springende Punkt: Claus Richter – Millions of Lights, 14.4. – 20.5.2011
    Claus Richter, announcement for the exhibition Millions of Light at the Kölnischer Kunstverein 2011

    archive series

    Opening: 13.04.2011, 7 pm

    Pink Walt Disney Sleeping Beauty castles in miniature format, villages made of Polly Pocket cottages, plastic cream cakes, masks and laser swords, Photographs of adventure and fantasy landscapes in theme parks – In this year’s archive project Millions of Lights, Claus Richter will be sifting through his own archive of toys and entertainment items and photos, and building his own little theme park, which will offer a very special look at the enticing worlds of Disneyland, Phantasialand and the studios of Hollywood.

    Millions of Lights is about escapism, about escaping the world. The materials presented not only reveal historical parallels between the worlds of art and entertainment, but also reveal a very clear picture of the construction of our world when observed closely.

    Claus Richter (*1971) recently presented a large solo exhibition at the Leopold-Hoesch-Museum in Düren. He has also had solo exhibitions at the Kunstverein Braunschweig (2008), the Ursula Blickle Foundation in Kraichtal, the Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Siegen (2005) and the Clages und Eva Winkeler Gallery in Cologne. At the Kölnischer Kunstverein he showed in the exhibition Après Crépuscule in 2009 and since then he is a studio fellow of the Kölnischer Kunstverein and the Imhoff Foundation. The exhibition is part of the series Antenne Köln.

    Guided tours through the archive project
    Fri. 29.04.2011, 5 p.m.
    Fri. 13.05.2011, 5 pm
    Sun. 15.05.2011, 11 am (Family tour International Museum Day)

    lecture performance
    Fugitives from the world by Claus Richter
    Wed 18.05.2011, 8 pm

    Claus Richter is supported by the Imhoff Foundation and the copy shop Print und Copy Center, Cologne.

  • Exhibition: Kerstin Brätsch und DAS INSTITUT– „Nichts, Nichts!”, 5.2. – 20.3.2011
    Kerstin Brätsch and DAS INSTITUT, Installation view, photo: Simon Vogel

    Kerstin Brätsch is a New York-based artist who was born in Hamburg, Germany, in 1979, and her paintings alternate between a distant third-person perspective and an enthusiastic, slogan-like voice promoting the Kerstin Brätsch “brand”. Brätsch teamed up with Adele Röder in 2007 to found the import-export agency DAS INSTITUT, in line with her idea that the “one-woman-artist” concept is no less conservative than the “one-man artist” model.

    Her painting is institutional critique in the form of resolute action. Brätsch consciously chooses to collaborate with other artists and uses humour to subtly undermine stereotypes and conventional notions of what it means to be an artist.

    Yet she does not stop at subversive strategies; she can also be very “in your face”, blasting apart the pretences of auratic painting with her ironic use of painterly gestures introduced by the generation of male artists who came before her. She picks up on strategies of disillusionment from painters like Martin Kippenberger and Albert Oehlen and succinctly challenges the seductive patterns and expressive language of painting.

2010
  • Exhibition: Verbotene Liebe – Kunst im Sog von Fernsehen, 25.9. – 19.12.2010
    Cover: Simon Denny, Photo: Simon Vogel

    With statements from Judith Barry, Joseph Beuys, Paul Chan, Mel Chin and the GALA Committee, Jaime Davidovich, Simon Denny, Kalup Linzy, Christoph Schlingensief, Ryan Trecartin, Francesco Vezzoli, Andy Warhol.

    While television still plays a part in determining our thinking, behaviour and actions as a matter of course, it is now also numbered among the things we no longer reflect upon by sheer force of habit. In light of this it seems an appropriate time to take another closer look at the “goggle box”. Forbidden Love: Art in the Wake of Television Camp will observe the seductive methods of television, with its “gaudy mannerisms”, and describe television as a world of experience with different formats, forms of communication and inherent ambiguities. The project aims neither at a thematic nor a moralistic analysis of television, but rather at an aesthetic, “camp” approach, in keeping with Susan Sontag’s analysis in her Notes on Camp.

    The exhibition Forbidden Love: Art in the Wake of Television Camp readdresses an area that the Kölnischer Kunstverein helped to shape decisively during the 1980s with the presentation of Gerry Schum’s Videogalerie – Fernsehgalerie in 1980 and through exhibitions such as Video-Skulptur in 1989 by Wulf Herzogenrath, and The Arts for Television in 1987. Today however, the focus for artists seems to not be so much a question of the development of technical possibilities or even a critique of this homogenising, consumer-oriented mass medium.

    At the same time, this year’s exhibitions like Changing Channels at the MUMOK in Vienna or Are you ready for TV? at MACBA in Barcelona show a renewed interest in historical art-projects for television from the 1960’s – 1980’s that paved the way for this kind of analysis of TV.

    Instead, Forbidden Love: Art in the Wake of Television Camp will present artists who work with the structural conventions of television, using them for their own ends. Like Warhol, these artists can knowingly utilise the rules of the attention-dependent economy, play with celebrity culture, and adopt the episodic structure of soaps, TV shows, music clips, or talk shows, turning them into something else. The exhibition includes artists who are not necessarily using their own transmission slot on television. Instead, like parasites, there are those that infiltrate existing TV with their own artistic concerns. One example is Mel Chin (b. 1951) and the GALA Committee, who manufactured and manipulated loaded stage props for the 4th and 5th seasons of the well-known television series Melrose Place.

    Having grown up with television, the younger artists in particular approach the medium from the position of the specialised viewer. They pursue a fascination for the dethroning of the serious (Sontag), for the stylistic howlers of image cultivation, and the opulence of surface splendour. As consumers of television, they return the ball to the opposing court and mirror the medium. The ambivalent and exclusive mechanisms of television, its ambiguous methods of communication and an attitude of expectation emerge particularly clearly in childlike role-playing, reflecting the desire for participation and an exaggerated cultivation of image.

    Artists like Kalup Linzy (b.1977) look back to television formats such as the Soap or the Casting-show. In his videos, reflecting upon childhood experiences, Linzy performs all the female main characters, if notalso all supporting roles. He performs with the knowledge that his brand of drag would be quite unlikely in „real“ television, while also repeating clichés and phrases bound to television and the enforced desire of intensity and fame. This attention to forms that shape desire is an aspect that one could also track in the work of Francesco Vezzoli’s (b.1981). Ryan Trecartin (b. 1981) picks up language, aesthetics and characters from the Internet and computer games as much as from TV. He blends stories and realities so much that they become quasi-abstract images.

    To give these various perspectives on television a framework Simon Denny (b. 1982) has developed a setting for the exhibition. His exhibition design works with the paradox that the television industry, being so strictly bound to the present, does not leave relics behind. Denny integrates the exhibition architecture with parts of stage sets from current television-shows borrowed from local TV-production company Brainpool, offsetting the art-object/sets by Mel Chin and the GALA committee with non-relics form the industry.

    The exhibition Forbidden Love: Art in the Wake of Television Camp is a co-operation with the Kunstverein Medienturm, Graz. A combined catalogue will be published with both institutions. The exhibition at the Kölnischer Kunstverein was conceived by Simon Denny, Kathrin Jentjens and Anja Nathan-Dorn. Simon Denny currently holds a studio-stipend from Kölnischer Kunstverein and the RheinEnergie Stiftung Kultur.

  • Exhibition: DIE LETZTEN IHRER ART – Eine Reise zu den Dinosauriern des Kunstbetriebs, 26.6. – 5.9.2010
    The Last Of Their Kind, announcement for the cooperation of the Kunstvereine 2010

    Cooperation of the Kunstvereine Düsseldorf – Köln – Bonn

    For the first time, the Kunstvereine Bonn, Düsseldorf and Cologne have developed a joint event and catalogue project to discuss the institutional challenges facing Kunstvereine in the 21st century. At their core, Kunstvereine are bourgeois institutions that developed in the pre-March of the 19th century as a committed response to the aristocratic salons. But what happens when we realize that in our post-bourgeois society, association culture, civic engagement and federal logics are experiencing a loss of significance, and how does this affect Kunstvereine?

    Alluding to Douglas Adams’ travelogue The Last of Their Kind, we present art associations as a perhaps endangered, but also special and very worthy of preservation species and examine them in various events in Bonn, Cologne, and Düsseldorf.

    exhibitions:

    Bonn Art Association
    26 June – 29 August 2010
    ALTRUISM: ART FROM CZECHIA TODAY
    in cooperation with tranzit, Prague
    Friday, 25 June, 19.45 Opening

    Cologne Art Association
    26 June – 5 September 2010
    MELANIE GILLIGAN
    in cooperation with Chisenhale Gallery, London
    Friday, 25 June, 7 pm Opening

    Art Association for the Rhineland and Westphalia, Düsseldorf
    26 June – 22 August 2010
    HENRIK PLENGE JAKOBSEN
    in cooperation with Overgaden, Copenhagen
    Friday, 25 June, 19.30 Opening

    Program:

    Friday, 25 June, from 10 pm
    joint party at the Kölnischer Kunstverein, Die Brücke, Hahnenstraße 6, 50667 Cologne. Music with CHRISTIAN NAUJOKS.

    Sunday, 27 June, 12 noon, at the Kölnischer Kunstverein, theatre hall
    Subject and society
    Artist talk with MELANIE GILLIGAN
    Polly Staple, director of the Chisenhale Gallery, London, will talk to MELANIE GILLIGAN about the background of the new film production “Popular Unrest” and ask her about her working methods and her collaboration with the twelve leading actors involved. It will be as much about MELANIE GILLIGAN’s reflections on the relationship between the individual and society and the economisation of social relations as it will be about her inspiration from television.

    Wednesday, 30 June, 7 pm, location: Bonner Kunstverein
    Altruism as a working principle for independent art institutions in the Czech Republic
    Exhibition tour and discussion with Stephan Strsembski and Noemi Smolik Stephan Strsembski, curator of the exhibition, and Noemi Smolik, art critic and connoisseur of the Czech art scene, lead through the exhibition ALTRUISM and discuss the situation of independent art institutions in the Czech Republic, their genesis and working methods in comparison to art associations in the German-speaking world.

    Thursday, 1 July, 7 pm, Location: Art Association for the Rhineland and Westphalia, Düsseldorf
    Other countries, other institutions.
    Interview with Henriette Bretton-Meyer
    Art associations exist only in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. What do comparable institutions in the rest of Europe look like? And what distinguishes an art association from the perspective of those who know this model only from a distance? Henriette Bretton-Meyer, Director of Overgaden in Copenhagen, discusses with Vanessa Joan Müller, Director Kunstverein Düsseldorf

    Wednesday, 7 July, 7 pm, Location: Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf
    Kunstverein: today, tomorrow, yesterday
    Interview with Wulf Herzogenrath and Florian Waldvogel
    Prof. Wulf Herzogenrath, director of the Kunsthalle Bremen, and Florian Waldvogel, director of the Kunstverein in Hamburg, discuss current perspectives of the institution Kunstverein, productive crises of the past and models for tomorrow.

    Wednesday, 25 August, 7 pm, Place: Kölnischer Kunstverein, Theatersaal
    Civic engagement as a way out of the crisis
    Interview with Loring Sittler, Future Fund of Generali Deutschland
    The Future Fund of Generali Deutschland is dedicated to promoting civic commitment and, in view of demographic change, concentrates in particular on the commitment of older people. In an interview Loring Sittler will explain to what extent this orientation can be an answer to the current transformation of tasks in the fields of politics, business and civil society and will present the Engagement Atlas 09.

    www.die-letzten-ihrer-art.org

  • Solo Exhibition: Melanie Gilligan, 26.6. – 5.9.2010
    Melanie Gilligan, announcement for the exhibition at the Kölnischer Kunstverein 2010, Design: Manuel Raeder

    Solo Exhibition in context of Die Letzten ihrer Art

    „Of course you’re special, special like everyone else.“
    Melanie Gilligan, Popular Unrest, 2010

    Melanie Gilligan works in various media such as video, performance, text, installation and music. Her new film, Popular Unrest, is a multi-episode drama set in a future much like the present. Here, however, all exchange transactions and social interactions are overseen by a system called ‘the Spirit’. A rash of unexplained killings has broken out across the globe. They often take place in public but witnesses never see an assailant. Just as mysteriously, groups of unrelated people are suddenly coming together everywhere, amassing new members rapidly. Unaccountably, they feel a deep and persistent sense of connection to one another. With this film Gilligan is reflecting a state of the society which is rather mirroring the casual meetings within the internet and the relationships we know from television than leading back to the principles of bourgeois society.

    Consequently, Popular Unrest will be published in the internet: www.popularunrest.org

    The film explores a world in which the self is reduced to physical biology, directly subject to the needs of capital. Hotels offer bed-warming servants with every room, people are fined for not preventing foreseeable illness, weight watching foods eat the digester from the inside and the unemployed repay their debt to society in physical energy. If on the one hand this suggests the complete domination of life by exchange value do the groupings offer a way out?

    Shot in London with a cast of twelve main actors, the film’s form is partly inspired by David Cronenberg’s ‘body horror’ and American television dramas CSI, Dexter and Bones, where reality is perceived through a pornographic forensics of empirical and visceral phenomena.
    The five episodes of the film will each be screened individually throughout the installation. As with Gilligan’s recent video works, the film’s episodic structure takes its cue from television and the medium’s ability to dispense its storyline in stages.

    Popular Unrest is co-commissioned by Chisenhale Gallery, London, Kolnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, Presentation House Gallery, North Vancouver and Walter Phillips Gallery, The Banff Centre, Banff. Supported by Galleria Franco Soffiantino, Turin.

    Furthermore Gilligan is showing two films in the cinema which are by subject connected to the new film production. Crisis in the Credit System (2008), a four-part fictional mini drama, is about a giant merchant bank inviting its employees to a meeting to develop strategies to get out of the financial crisis. The single screen film Self-capital (2009) shows capitalism as a person undergoing a therapy.

    Melanie Gilligan was born in Toronto in 1979. She currently lives and works in London and New York. Gilligan completed a BA (Hons) Fine Art at Central Saint Martins in 2002 and was a Fellow with the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Programme in 2004-5. Recent exhibitions include: Chisenhale Gallery London (2010), Transmission Gallery Glasgow (2008) as part of the Glasgow International Festival and Franco Soffiantino Gallery, Turin (2009). In October 2009 Gilligan was the recipient of a Paul Hamlyn Award for Artists.

  • Solo Exhibition: Alexandra Bircken – Blondie, 22.4. – 6.6.2010
    Alexandra Bircken,announcement for the exhibition Blondie at the Kölnischer Kunstverein 2010, Design: Manuel Raeder

    At this year’s Art Cologne, we will be presenting Alexandra Bircken (*1967), an extraordinary Cologne artist currently enjoying the international spotlight. As a former participant in the studio grant program (2004–2008) the Kölnischer Kunstverein has been following her career since the very beginning.

    Over the past few years, Bircken has developed an individual sculptural language that reveals a deep understanding of the materials she employs and a sensitive approach to both natural and artificial materials. For her solo exhibition Blondie, Bircken developed freestanding sculptures, hanging objects and wall art from ropes, vintage clothing pieces, wood, concrete, articles used in daily life, hair and wool. The quintessential element within these works is the point at which a functional item is transformed into an aesthetic object or narrative microcosm.

    When Bircken, who first began her career as a fashion designer, started working as an artist in 2004, her jewelry and clothing pieces began evolving into devious shapes and spatial designs and soon lost all semblance of gender specificity or even functionality. Being aware of the artificiality and role play within fashion, Bircken’s use of wool, branches and stones – materials with an inherent air of authenticity – at first seems to be a faux pas. But she bucks this value judgment, focusing instead on the psychology at work behind the interplay of interaction and confrontation between wildly different materials that relate to a confusing set of pop cultural references. Her working methods place Bircken in the generation of younger artists that have very consciously chosen a formal artistic approach.

    Bircken’s consistency to work through and continuously develop formal problems can be traced throughout her past solo exhibitions at the Stedelijk Museum CS in Amsterdam and at the Ursula Blickle Stiftung in Kraichtal (both in 2008). Furthermore Bircken exhibited at BQ in Berlin (2009, 2006 and 2004), at Gladstone Gallery in New York (2007) and Herald Street in London (2009, 2005). She participated in group exhibitions among others at Kunstverein Freiburg, at Barbican Art Gallery, London (2008), at New Museum, New York (2007) and at White Columns, New York (2005).

  • Exhibition: ars viva 09/10 – Geschichte/History, 20.2. – 4.4.2010
    ars viva 09/10, announcement for the axhibition at the Kölnischer Kunstverein 2010, Design: Manuel Raeder

    An exhibition of the award winners Bildende Kunst des Kulturkreises der deutschen Wirtschaft im BDI e.V., in cooperation with the Museum Wiesbaden, the Kölnischer Kunstverein and the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich
    Winners: Mariana Castillo Deball, Dani Gal, Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda

    Opening on February the 19, 2010, 7 pm

    The Kölnischer Kunstverein is delighted to be able to present this year’s prestigious ars viva prize exhibition on the theme of History. The Kulturkreis der deutschen Wirtschaft im BDI e.V. (Cultural Circle of German Industry in the BDI, reg. charity) awarded the ars viva prize for visual arts of € 5,000 each to Mariana Castillo Deball (b. 1975), Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda (b. 1976/77), and Dani Gal (b. 1975). Three exhibitions (in the Museum Wiesbaden, in the Kölnischer Kunstverein and in the migros museum für gegenwartskunst in Zurich) in the series ars viva are linked to the promotional prize, and these will be accompanied by a catalogue in two languages and an artist’s edition. The three prize-winners were chosen from 44 artists in whose work the investigation of the construction of historical facts is of central importance.

    It is striking that all the prize-winning artists engage in their work with the question of the construction of history, how and why it comes to be used today in the political but also the economic sphere. They concentrate in their works on the historical document as the smallest common factor on which, seen from today, agreement can be reached.

2009
  • Exhibition: Lecture Performance, 23.10. – 20.12.2009
    Lecture Performance, announcement for the exhibition at the Kölnischer Kunstverein 2009. Design: Manuel Raeder

    With Fia Backström, Lutz Becker, Walter Benjamin, Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz, Andrea Fraser, Dan Graham, Achim Lengerer, Michael Lentz/Uli Winters, Xavier Le Roy, Robert Morris, Martha Rosler, TkH, V-Girls, Jeronimo Voss.

    The lecture performance has become a feature of contemporary art. Various descriptions of the phenomenon have circulated over the past few years. Artists in this comparatively young genre work at the interface between lecturing and performing, seeking out creative ways of including traditional methods of artistic communication in presenting themselves to an audience. The technique involves elements of self-reflection, discussion and performance.

    The exhibition Lecture Performance highlights the artistic nature of this method by presenting the latest installations and live performances by Fia Backström, Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz, Achim Lengerer, TkH, Tris Vonna-Michell and Jeronimo Voss and shows where the roots of this contemporary phenomenon lie.

    The exhibition also includes reference works – which provides inspiration for many young artists – in the form of videos and performance documentation by the V-Girls, Andrea Fraser, Martha Rosler and the French choreographer Xavier Le Roy.

    The uniqueness and contemporary relevance of lecture performances lies in their hybrid nature, which combines functional presentations with artistic performance: On the one hand they draw on historical methods, and on the other they reflect artists’ responses to today’s art world, in which the boundaries between production, communication and criticism are becoming increasingly blurred.

    The exhibition is a collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade and part of the series European Partnerships and kindly supported by Kunststiftung NRW and Goethe-Institute.
    We also like to thank Köllefolien.

  • Exhibition: Everything, then, passes between us, 27.6. – 23.8.2009
    Everything, then, passes between us, announcement for the exhibition at the Kölnischer Kunstverein 2009.

    With Vito Acconci, Johanna Billing, Olga Chernysheva, Song Dong, Anja Kirschner, Klara Lidén, Improv Everywhere, Cinthia Marcelle, Marjetica Potrc, Christine Schulz, Alex Villar, Haegue Yang. Kuratiert von Christine Nippe.

    The exhibition Everything, then, passes between us shows snap-shots of urban life. It asks how forms of public or of temporary communities can be produced nowadays. The artists question fragmentary aspects of metropolises in times of global turmoil and ask for actual ideas of community and collecti-vity in the cities.

    The exhibition, curated by Christine Nippe, places its focus on artistic interventions and performances in global metropolises such as Beijing, Belo Horizonte, Berlin, Cologne, London, New York and Seoul, and shows The Metropolis and Mental Life, only one hundred years after Georg Simmel’s famous essay on the mentality of the inhabitants of big cities, published in 1903.

  • Solo Exhibition: Nora Schultz – 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0, 23.4. – 7.6.2009
    Nora Schultz, 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0, announcement for the exhibition at the Kölnischer Kunstverein 2009.

    In her first institutional solo exhibition, 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0, Nora Schultz (*1975) shows comprehensive installations, slide projections and films that express, in an abstract way, her intensive examination of a tangible reality. A direct language and the framing of cultural, political and ethnographic values are the parameters that mutually pervade in her works.

    For the exhibition room Nora Schultz has created an installation seizing fundamental sculptural questions. The installation shows several chrome-plated pipes mounted firmly on the wall or hung on a rope. Like a mobile, they sometimes arrange themselves in a perfect balance resembling a set of scales, and sometimes they loose balance and seem to struggle for their position.

    Nora Schultz’ sculptures countermand the well-balanced weight ratio of the contrapposto in classical sculpture. Her works offer no well-balanced relation between calmness and motion, tension and relaxation, or bondage and liberty of the body. The ratio of carrier and (self) weight incurs imbalance. Schultz’ minimal sculptures consist of industrial materials, found objects, building materials and ship’s ropes. Their texture suggests an association to the unfinished, to building and travelling. The authority of an “it has been so“ is dissipated by the doubling and reproduction of images and situations while offering at the same time another “authenticity“ arising from the animation of the shown objects.

    Two slide projections in the rear part of the room complement the fragile sculptures. The first series of slides records three-dimensional objects via two-dimensional photographies taken from different angles. The image sequence is consequently dynamised and put into motion. Another slide projection welcomes the visitor in the last room, showing found and personal  pictures of travels. The abstract indications of an (im)balance of masses and values are translated into far-reaching cultural and political images. Schultz establishes associative references to the French author and ethnologist Michel Leiris who, in his travel journeys and essays, offers an unsparing self analysis and an open, immediate impression of his experiences with foreign cultures. In his diary, L´Afrique Fantôme, Leiris describes African rituals of tribal civilizations that reflect not only their own history. The rituals comment and parody European civilizations and show that there never is just one ruling point of view onto a subject, but that this point of view entirely is thrown back.

    Along with these new works, Nora Schultz shows further works corresponding with regards to content. Her arrow sculpture (2007) can be read as a typographic two-dimensional emblem operating as cross-reference and, at the same time, as a real object and visualisation of an arrow projectile. Similar to the set of scales, the status of the x-tables (2007) hovers between literal figure and object and shows an instability and reversal of the carrier/weight ratio. A slide projection in the basement raises the issue of the well known case of a failed balancing act: the story of Fidgety Philip from Heinrich Hoffmann’s Slovenly Peter (Struwwelpeter ), a classical German children’s story. In 1845, at the time of the German national revolution, Hoffmann, a doctor and director of the asylum in Frankfurt (Anstalt für Irre und Epileptische), wrote the story of a little boy who is unable to sit still at the table. The rebellious child defies all rules and educational methods of its parents and accomplishes acrobatic exercises on the chair. His attempt to balance on two chair legs fails and comes to a bad end. In the slide projection the table becomes the main player. The controversially discussed children’s book has been translated into over 30 different languages; the illustrations show the diverse interpretations of this story given by different cultures all over the world.

  • Exhibition: Après Crépuscule, 7.2. – 5.4.2009
    Aprés Crépuscule, Kölnischer Kunstverein 2009, Installation view, photo: Simon Vogel

    Exhibition with statements by J. Louis Again, Michael Bracewell, Enrico David, Devine & Griffiths, Christian Flamm, Julian Göthe, Benoit Hennebert, Julia Horstmann, Linder, Lucy McKenzie, Claus Richter, Hanna Schwarz, Claude Stassart, Lawrence Weiner, Detlef Weinrich, Denyse Willem.

    The small Belgian record company Les Disques du Crépuscule created an astonishingly effective, yet hardly systematically explored cultural phenomenon on the fringes of pop and high art.

    In the course of the pop music New Wave, the label created an identity from the beginning of the 80s, consisting of contemporary music, cover texts and a unique visual presentation. Chief designer Benoit Hennebert and his colleagues created a shimmering style from the play with ideas of early modernity, old advertising graphics and the comic style of the “Ligne Claire”.

    The label Œuvre had a musical influence that extended beyond limited scenes in Japan alone. And although artists such as Lawrence Weiner, Linder and Denyse Willem contributed works to Les Disques du Crépuscule, there was no closer connection to the Brussels gallery scene of the 1980s. In recent years, however, artists such as Enrico David, Christian Flamm, Julia Horstmann, Lucy McKenzie, Claus Richter, Hanna Schwarz, and Detlef Weinrich have been making direct references to the label, its music, and its graphics.

    It is important to investigate this exciting, because immediate and yet mostly hidden, history of impact. The exhibition is therefore divided into two parts: In the exhibition hall, works by Linder, Lawrence Weiner, Benoit Hennebert and others will be on display that were created during the label’s active period, as well as works by young international artists who deal with the label in their current perspective. In the seminar room on the third floor, visitors are offered further historical documents, archive materials, photos, videos and music for active study.

2008
  • Solo Exhibition: Seth Price, 14.10.2008 – 4.1.2009
    Seth Price, Köln WavesBlues, 2005–2008, Kölnischer Kunstverein 2008, Installation view, photo: Simon Vogel

    The inkjet-on canvas “calendar paintings”of the American artist Seth Price (born in 1973, lives and works in New York) contain pictures from the less known period of American painting between the World Wars, as well as obsolete computer graphics and magazine advertisements. These works, which he designed, composed and executed in 2003 and 2004 but has seldom exhibited, build the main focus of the upcoming solo exhibition at the Kölnischer Kunstverein. In the exhibition room Seth Price presents his workson suspended wall panels. Accompanying the paintings are vacuum-formed polystyrene reliefs with masks or facial imprints, looking like glamorous high-definition products. The reliefs have been produced in different colours and bear their date of production. The presentation is completed by a painterly video projection in form of a program loop showing a computer-animated sequence of black water in motion. The video is based on a 5-second loop sold for business use, which Price purchased and treated with color and motion effects.

    Atmospheric as it is, the installation creates the impression of a journey through time during which the different handling and use of things, objects and pictures, is shown. Price manipulates found pictures, shows their changeability and their dependence on presentation and distribution structures and also makes his own manipulations visible. The journey of a picture from the computer screen onto a canvas and vice versa can suddenly be experienced as a tightrope walk. While the calendar paintingsquestion the idea of painting freed from time or function by correlating it to trivial wall-calendars often seen in offices, Price’s plastic reliefs exaggerate the idea of Pop Art to show pictures and sculptures as desirable consumer products. He presents the reliefs as mere covers; they are negative form of the depicted objects and materialize only in their surface form.

    Seth Price’s film Digital Video Effect: Editions (2006) will be shown in the cinema. This film is a montage composed entirely of material from Price’s own earlier videos, here transferred to a 16 mm film format. The materials Price has used in his video editions, and which reappear here in cut-up form, include manipulated film footage by Joan Jonas from the early 1970s, a video by Martha Rosler that took up TV advertisements from 1985, pictures from the Internet, and news footage from the 1981 assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan. It is no longer discernable who is speaking, what is commented on, or what is inside and what is outside. Low-definition and high-definition material is equally juxtaposed. The critic Polly Staple explains Price’s method of operation with the fact that nowadays it seems oddly outmoded to try and break up arrangements and systems because an unambiguousalternative is just as inexistent as a clear opposition:

    “We have multiple styles and approaches now. There is infinite access to and collisions of meaning and value systems. There is a plethora of choices and a surfeit of images within the cultural logic of late capitalism. Here, defined by media, image becomes material. Price works in the realm of this new American Sublime“.

    A collaborative working method is of likewise importance to Seth Price. He is co-founder of the New York publication series Continuous Project, together with writer Bettina Funcke, artist Wade Guyton, and designer Joseph Logan. During the exhibition his latest publication How to Disappear in America (Leopard Press, 2008)is available at the Kölnischer Kunstverein; this book explains how one can successfully disappear in American society. Last year Seth Price received the award of the city of Lyon as a special award for his work at the Lyon Biennale. Most recently Price’s works were shown in exhibitions at the Kunsthalle Zurich and at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford. A monographic catalogue with a text by Michael Newman will be published in cooperation with the Kunsthalle Zurich.

  • Exhibition: Der Springende Punkt: Olivier Foulon – The Soliloquy of the Broom/Selbstgespräch eines Besens, 23.8. – 28.9.2008
    Olivier Foulon, The Soliloquy of the BroomSelbstgespräch eines Besens, announcement for the exhibition at the Kölnischer Kunstverein 2008, Design: Manuel Räder in Zusammenarbeit mit Olivier Foulon

    Archive series

    2nd floor

    The title of the exhibition TheSoliloquy of the Broom/Selbstgespräch eines Besens by the artist Olivier Foulon (*Brussels, 1976) hovers between make-up, masquerade and painting. At the center is the painting Jo, theBeautifulIrish Girl by Gustave Courbet, which the French painter produced in Trouville in 1865. It shows a lady named Jo, lover and model of the artist James Whistler, looking at herself and her hair in a mirror. Due to great demand, Gustave Courbet copied this painting several times. The four versions are now in the Metropolitan Museum, New York, the Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City, the National Museum, Stockholm and a private collection. Olivier Foulon has brought the four pictures together in a 16mm film and works with the idea of ¨Modells as a template for a painting, which itself becomes the model wird¨ and illustrates with this project early forms of artistic mass production.
    A publication published by Gevaert éditions is the second part of the exhibition. Olivier Foulon selects from an online archive three texts from the art magazine Artforum International from 2005 about the artist Michael Krebber and republishes them. The texts have already been cleared of the originally accompanying illustrations and figures, the “picture make-up”, on their way from print to online format and provided with the laconic reference “illustration omitted”.

    In both works, Foulon questions the meaning and function of an artist’s personal signature. By copying his own pictures, Gustave Courbet questions the idea of the artist’s handwriting just as Michael Krebber does in his work. In the form of annually changing exhibitions, the series Der sprende Punkt provides insight into the archives of institutions or individuals that offer important points of departure for curatorial work. The starting point for Foulon’s research was the Marcel Proust Archive of Prof. Dr. Reiner Speck. Olivier Foulon is an artist who creates in his work arrangements in which art history can be negotiated and read in a new way. His conceptual approach is based on the appropriation and play with specific historical models. He is concerned with the relationship between original, copy and reproduction, and with the reading and presentation of works of art and the role of the artist within them.

    Our thanks go to the Metropolitan Museum, New York, Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City, National Museum, Stockholm, Sotheby’s Cologne/New York and the representation of the French Community of Belgium and the Walloon Region

    Co-production of the Kölnischer Kunstverein and If I can’t dance, Amsterdam.

  • Exhibition: Many Challenges Lie Ahead in the Near Future, 23.8. – 28.9.2008
    Many Challenges Lie Ahead in the Near Future, Miloš Tomic Clay Pigeon, 2005, Kölnischer Kunstverein 2008, Installation view, photo: Simon Vogel

    With Milos Tomic, Bojan Sarcevic, Vladimir Nikolic, Lulzim Zeqiri. curated by Radmila Joksimovic.

    Starting point for the exhibition Many Challenges Lie Ahead in the Near Future are subconscious expectations that artists and the art coming from the Balkans encounter.

    When it comes to artists from the Balkan countries, the question of origin seems very often more important than other aspects or questions that their art works deal with. During the last decade several well known exhibitions, among others In den Schluchten des Balkan, Kunsthalle Fredericianum, Kassel, 2003, Blut und Honig, Sammlung Essl, Vienna, 2003, In Search of Balkania, Graz in 2002, have presented contemporary artists from the Balkan region to a Western audience. The exhibitions gave the artists the opportunity to present their work to an international audience while at the same time encumbered the artists with the question of what it means to be an „artist from the Balkans“.

    Of course, the viewers’ awareness of the origin of an artist is not without consequences. Certain expectations arise concerning the images as well as topics and questions that the art from the Balkans is supposed to show and to deal with, such as the political situation in these countries, communism, the Balkan wars of 1990s or exotic folklore and tradition that exists only in „the Gorges of the Balkans“. In such circumstances the question arises of how artists come to terms with these expectations. The four artists presented in this exhibition put the desired images at the core of their work and discuss their artistic position from there on.

    Bojan Šarèeviæ (born 1974 in Belgrade, Serbia) originates from the former Yugoslavia, but received his artistic education in France and now lives in Paris and Berlin. In his artist book Kissing the back of your hand makes the sound like a wounded bird (2007) he comments ironically on the never changing reception of his works on the basis of his origin. Next to the reproduction of his sculptural works, installations and videos (all of them as abstract as the title of his book), instead of art historical interpretations of his works, Šarèeviæ offers to the reader texts about the political and economical situation in the Balkan region: The Western Balkans: moving on (Chaillot Paper No. 70, Institute for Securtity Studies, European Union, Paris).

    In his video Clay Pigeon Miloš Tomiæ (born 1976 in Belgrade, Serbia) shows a love story that is at the same time a story of war. The seductive way of editing, flirting with the aesthetics of silent movies, as well as his humorous approach prevents the story from becoming overdramatic. Tomiæ uses a specific motif of the history of the Balkans in order to call attention to a universal question.

    In his video Heroes Lulzim Zeqiri (born 1978 in Gjilan, Kosovo) solves a double problem of legitimation. On the one hand he deals with the question of his position as an artist within the European context, and on the other hand with the question of his position within the Kosovo society. To solve the first question, Zeqiri offers an ironic, orientalistic staging of three musicians playing a traditional melody in traditional poses. On the other hand, he is aware that one is legitimized in Zeqiris own society by gaining recognition as national hero. This is why he lets the singers in their traditional song sing about contemporary artists from Kosovo instead of national heroes.

    In his video The Death Anniversary Vladimir Nikoliæ (born 1974 in Belgrade, Serbia) takes a wailer from a village in Montenegro to the tomb of Marcel Duchamp in Rouen to do her mourning in this place. In this video Nikoliæ criticises a principle often used by artists: to use the ancient customs and traditions of their countries of origin as „ready-made“ and to show it in such an unprocessed form. He refers to this kind of art not as contemporary, but „ethnic art“ or „Look How We Celebrate Religious Holidays In My Land–art“.

  • Solo Exhibition: Michael Krebber – Pubertät in der Lehre, 21.6. – 28.9.2008
    Michael Krebber, announcement for the exhibition Pubertät in der Lehre/Puberty in Teaching at the Kölnischer Kunstverein 2008

    Guest: Stefan Hoderlein

    The title of the exhibition, Puberty in Teaching, is at first sight paradoxical, since the two concepts, teaching and puberty, seem contradictory. One thinks both of Michael Krebber’s idea of Puberty in Painting and also of his professorship at the StädelSchool in Frankfurt. Also implied is the question of whether it is possible to teach art at all and, if it is the case that there is no subject matter to teach, of how authority is then to be defined. Here Krebber is presenting a subject that is for him deeply serious, one which he has pursued passionately, and in which he is committed to an attitude which is in itself contradictory, indeed quasi pubertarian.

    Michael Krebber (born 1954) is one of the most influential artists working in Cologne, and we are delighted to be presenting his first exhibition in a major institution here in Cologne. Krebber plays an important role precisely for the younger generation of international artists, people like Merlin Carpenter, Sergej Jensen, Michael Beutler and John Kelsey.Hebecame known in the Eighties and Nineties as the antithesis of the positions represented in Berlin and Cologne by painters like Baselitz, Lüperz, Kippenberger and Oehlen.

    Michael Krebber was always viewed as a painter with a conceptual orientation. This label is applied to an oeuvre in which he has for more than 25 years been testing out the frontiers and possibilities of painting, without his work itself always appearing in the form of painting. However attributing him to conceptualism diverts attention from the purely formal qualities of his work. The question arises of whether Krebber uses this type of attribution simply as a trick for his work at certain times, in which grasping or outreach and simultaneous rejection, false bottoms, dead ends and illusions are everywhere immanent.

    ‘But the more recent term Formalism too, once considered by all and sundry to be a form of smoothly functioning double-agency, should be included in any debate on widening the approach to reception and production.

    Exclusively sculptures are on show in the exhibition puberty in sculpture; pieces of sawn-up surfboards as wall sculptures, and on the lawn in front of the Kunstverein an open air sculpture inspired by the HOLLYWOOD sign, displaying the words Herr Krebber in large letters. All these ideas are either from bad jokes, or are just plain uninteresting, or are stolen or copied from somewhere else. Surfboards, carved in slices like tuna-fish and hung on the wall like a Donald Judd sculpture, and the words Herr Krebber erected like a sign to attract buyers for a plot of land.

    These sculptures confront us with the weight and materiality which are required by object-based practice, requirements which can be avoided in teaching, philosophy and in other forms of mediation.

    Herr Krebber is an adaptation of Paul Valéry’s Monsieur Teste, who isnt capable of identifying with any one role, whatever it might be, and who “is aware of the possibility that forgery too can be forged”. In this exhibition and in the book which accompanies it, the answer to the question of how Monsieur Teste would deal with these sculptures is put on hold.’ (Michael Krebber)

    As back-up for the exhibition, which, with its concentration on sculpture, introduces a second phase in Krebber’s work, Stefan Hoderlein will show films, which he has shot with by night a thermal-imaging camera in car parks favoured for cruising.

    The catalogue too forms a central part of the exhibition, with texts by Alex Foges, John Kelsey and Tanja Widmann, and a series of more than eighty reproductions of Michael Krebber’s older drawings. It is published by the Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König and costs 32 Euro/ 28 Euro for members of the Kölnischer Kunstvereins.

    With the exhibition a special edition will be published: Michael Krebber, HiFly, 2008, Surfboard slices, 12 Unique pieces, price, 490 Euro each.

  • Solo Exhibition: Mark Leckey – Resident, 14.4. – 8.6.2008
    Mark Leckey,announcement for the exhibition Resident at the Kölnischer Kunstverein 2008

    CENTRAL Kunstpreis

    Mark Leckey (born 1964), laureate of the CENTRAL Art Award, is presenting a comprehensive solo exhibition at the Kölnischer Kunstverein under the title of Resident. This title refers not only to Leckey’s residency at the Kunstverein but also to the idea of the exhibition, which is arranged along the main horizontal and vertical axes of the building. One of Leckey’s characteristic strategies is to use his place of residence as a starting point for his work.

    The horizontal axis of the exhibition space is devoted to Leckey’s video installation Cinema-in-the-Round (2007), in which he presents his collection of film, television and video quotations in a sort of performance lecture. Fascinated by how the images on the screen seem to come to life, the artist talks about the transitions between two- and three-dimensionality and the relationship between object and image. The sculptural quality of the films comes to the fore in Cinema-in-the-Round, in the 16mm film Made in ’Eaven (2004) and the videos Felix gets Broadcasted (2007) and The Thing in Regent’s Park (2006). Made in ´Eaven gives us the impression that the camera portrays Jeff Koons’s famous Playboy Bunny from all sides. Only when we see the reflection on the shiny surface of the sculpture – which reflects the artist’s studio, but not the camera – do we realize that the sequence was animated. It was transferred to16mm film and is presented on a pedestal, like a sculpture. In The Thing in Regent’s Park, we see a curious animated sculpture (by J. D. Williams) walking through Regents Park in London, taking the same route that the artist uses to go to his studio every day. Mark Leckey will also use a zoetrope – a device that creates the illusion of moving images – to cause areproduction of the rooster figure in front of the Kunstverein building to appear to walk.

    Mark Leckey also took the publicity for the exhibition in hand. He turned two windows of the exhibition space into display windows to present his artistic production to passers-by, prolonging in this way the row of small shop windows in Hahnenstraße.

    The vertical axis runs from the basement to the Theatersaal, presenting works in which Leckey considers the mechanisms of television. The centre of attention is the cartoon figure Felix the Cat, which was used in the 1920s as test pattern for the first television broadcasts in the USA. Leckey constructed a kind of film set for the cartoon figure on the stage of the Theatre space, recreating props from a photograph of the origianl set. A humerous 16mm Felix cartoon is shown in the cinema, and in the basement there is a sound sculpture in the shape of a heater which appears to fire the installation from below.

    In May Leckey will hold a live performance in the film set installation on the stage. He will give a lecture on his ideas about the history of television, its significance and decay, and including the role of the BBC in this context.

    In the 1990s, looking for new forms of expression in the medium, Leckey cut and manipulated music and found footage to make video-clips of his own. Today, however, image, film and television sequences have become easily and freely available on the Internet and the sampling technique has become a standard art form. This new situation has led Leckey to deal more closely with the making of his “own” images and to consider the role of art and the place of art production in his videos and installations.

    Leckey became known through his videos, but also for his work with the band Jack2Jack. Together with Ed Liq, Bonnie Camplin and Enrico David, he created the band donAteller. Leckey recently had a solo exhibition at Le Consortium in Dijon, following projects at the Portikus in Frankfurt, the Migros Museum in Zurich, the Tate Britain in London and participation in group exhibitions at P.S.1/MoMA, Dundee Contemporary Arts and the Manifesta 5. Mark Leckey is professor of film at the Städelschule in Frankfurt.

    The international jury for the 2008 CENTRAL Art Award of € 75,000 consisted of curators Heike Munder (Migros Museum, Zurich), Catherine Wood (Tate Modern, London) and Charles Esche (VanAbbe Museum, Eindhoven), the chairman of the board of the Central Krankenversicherung, Dr. Joachim von Rieth, Kathrin Jentjens and Anja Nathan-Dorn.

  • Exhibition: Konzepte der Liebe, 9.2. – 30.3.2008
    Konzepte der Liebe, announcement for the exhibition at the Kölnischer Kunstverein 2008

    WIth Gerry Bibby, Bless, Keren Cytter, Ekkehard Ehlers, Stephan Geene, Frauke Gust, Judith Hopf, Francesca Lacatena, Henrik Olesen, Monika Rinck, de Rijke⁄de Rooij, Jörg Rode, Deborah Schamoni, Klaus Theweleit, Florian Zeyfang.
    Invited by Judith Hopf, Kathrin Jentjens and Anja Nathan-Dorn.

    Concepts of Love is an exhibition that pursues artistic discourses, productions and discussions thematising or – more precisely – thinking proactively the experience of “falling in love” as a radical form of movement.

    The experience of ”falling in love“ cannot be drawn up as it lies beyond rational options of resolution. But love itself is not seen as irrational. It is linked with uncountable political, aesthetical and desire-related projections, compositions and concepts. The lovers’ talks, products and analyses of these love concepts stand for the most part in contrast with a capitalistic logic of reference. They might be stoked up, inhibited, manipulated, or psychoanalytically explained but cannot possibly be ”calculated“ in a success-oriented way. Only when the lovers succeed in accepting the difference between each other or when he⁄she is able to – as author Monika Rinck words it – ”think the You beyond the I“ can love take effect.

    If one follows for example the theses and experiences of Roland Barthes, hypersensibility, transgression, prodigality, acceleration and deceleration as well as unforeseeable agitations against the functionalization and instrumentalisation of the subject are common acts and experiences of lovers. The inability to ”please oneself (and fall) in love“ and to adjust to the conditions and demands of everyday and of working life is not regarded as a weakness but instead is deliberately seen as (a likewise political) strength. In spite of lovelorn blindness, one is able to see clearly, reaches most tender insights and acts radically and – in social consensus – mostly incorrect.

    Starting point for Concepts of Love is the work of Judith Hopf with whom we developed the exhibition. The question of the impulse and social sense of a possible productivity that can – or cannot – be communicated and negotiated in polity plays an important role in her works. Along with her own works, a large number of co-productions came into being, some of which, like for example the video Bei mir zu dir (tv.Low-dunkel), 2005, realized by Hopf and Stephan Geene or Elevator Curator, 2005, and Hospital Bone Dance,2006 which Hopf produced together with Deborah Schamoni will be shown.
    With the works of Bless, Gerry Bibby, de Rijke⁄de Roij Eckehard Ehlers and Jörg Rode, Francesca Lacatena and Florian Zeyfang, Concepts of Love is an exhibition showing different attempts to find a language for these movements of love. In terms of a moment of intensification and dissipation, artist such as Keren Cytter and Henrik Olesen will develop own satellites or small universes within the exhibition. A lecture by Klaus Theweleit and a reading by author Monika Rinck will expands the array of events within Concepts of Love.

2007
  • Exhibition: Élégance, 3.11. – 23.12.2007

    How does art relate to money? Is art no more than a consumption-object? Are political contents more than a price rising factor on the overheated art market? How much leeway is given if private sponsors have to close the gaps of missing public support for art institutions? Is it possible that sponsors get involved in art other than in terms of money? Aren’t creativity, critical self conception and awareness of the needs of a society indispensable signs of modern market strategies? And isn’t the production of glamour a survival strategy for cultural producers in the times of neo-liberalism? Élégance goes into these questions in four ambivalent installations.

    Julika Rudelius’ video installation Economic Primacy (2005) shows top managers and millionaires talking about their relationship to money. They are each filmed inside an anonymous office. They answer questions that are posed via inter phone and unheard by the viewer. A strange situation,making the viewer unsure whether the filmed persons pose for the public or are justifying themselves, or whether they are intimately soliloquising. The personal way of speech involves the viewer and withdraws the neutralising distance.

    Merlin Carpenter presents four prestigious Mercedes-Benz mountain bikes entitled David’s Soul (1999/2007). The bicycles were not sponsored by Mercedes-Benz or the Daimler AG, but acquired by purchase. In a wilful parallel to the art market, Carpenter uses products of a global art market developing their value not least through their name. In a rather cynic way, the original idea of a ready-made as an object being linked to industrial reproduction and to the question of authorship is twisted here. And even the glamorous way way of dealing with popular culture, as is evident in the work of Jeff Koons, is broken through the presentation.

    For his project Radical Loyality (ongoing since 2003) he bought an estate in Estonia in order to build a sculpture park. Instead of asking for financial support, he invited the directors of big international companies to conversation. Talking on the subject of „loyalty“ they developed concepts for sculptures for the park together. Sculptors from Estonia, who in Soviet times created communist monuments, are now supposed to realise these plans. At the Kölnischer Kunstverein, he will document the actual state of his project. Chris Evans’ work is not only a comment on cultural institutions’ dependence on sponsorships and enterprises. It could also be interpreted in the sense of an ironic criticism of neo-liberal take-over in the European societies if he did not (at the same time) accept complicity with global players by seeking an open dialogue with the managers.

    Automne/Frottée 06/07 (2006) is a work by Thea Djordjadze, Gerda Scheepers and Rosemarie Trockel. The title, deriving from the world of fashion, refers to an installation dealing with prestige, self-dramatization and its condition of oneself. It consists of a stage evocative of a protective casket, where one can see two video installations. Further elements of the installation, a coffin-like car roof box for car-roofs, a bed, a heavy, grey curtain and three bath robes evoke intimacy and preciousness as much as death and decay. One of the sources for this work was a documentary on „Swankers“, South-African mine-workers, who save the last cents of their poor income for expensive suits from fashion designers. In nightly meetings they present the special features of these suits in dance-like performances.

  • Solo Exhibition: Boris Sieverts – Büro für Städtereisen, 23.8. – 30.9.2007
    Boris Sieverts, announcement for the exhibition Büro für Städtereisen (City Tour Office) at the Kölnischer Kunstverein 2007

    For the last 10 years, Boris Sieverts has guided people through urban landscapes. He started in Cologne, on the right side of the Rhine – right outside his doorstep. Additional tours in Cologne continued, followed by an entire series in the Ruhr area, Paris, Rotterdam and other cities. He also returned to Cologne to give tours time and again.

    Since 2000, he has offered these tours through his Büro für Städtereisen (City Tour Office). The one- or multiple-day tours lead people through areas of the city far away from the centre and popular tourist destinations – to places people would not normally visit. It is exactly these fringe areas, whether inside or outside the city, as well as spots between densely populated regions, which remove people from their normal societal contexts. Participants gain a perspective of the range and diversity of space possible when nothing needs to be put in its place. Sieverts’ walking and cycling tours unite rundown areas and housing estates of all kinds, car parks, demolition sites, man-made lakes, forests, meadows, gardens, motorways, schools, harbours, asylum-seekers’ hostels, railway tracks, exercise areas, industrial estates, airports, tunnels, underground car marks, cul-de-sacs, beaten paths, flood plains, waste dumps and many other sites to create tours of space ranging from the beautiful to the grotesque.

    Boris Sieverts created a programme of eight tours for the exhibition at the Kölnischer Kunstverein, seven of which are in Cologne and surrounding areas. Some of the tours were designed years ago, others are being conducted for the first time. This is a unique opportunity for people to experience unexplored areas of city in this agglomeration in a concentrated period of time. Boris Sieverts’ Büro für Städtereisen, enables us to focus on the practice of art outside of the conventional art market and the exhibition format. His work is a functioning form of the service of art. In keeping with this idea, Boris Sieverts’ tour office will be relocated to the Kunstverein, and the Kunstverein will become a site of business. Sieverts will also hold so-called Google Earth lectures on four Wednesday evenings: He has selected colleagues to assist in the discussion, people with a fascinating interest and ability in talking about their relationship to their environment. Sieverts will integrate virtual flights and projected images into his discussion of near and remote locations. The audience can suggest different cities, make comments or just listen.

  • Exhibition: Pure Self Expression, 2.6. – 12.8.2007
    Pure Self Expression, announcement for the exhibition at the Kölnischer Kunstverein 2007

    Dirk Bell, Lisa Lapinski, Manuela Leinhoß, Melvin Moti, Mai-Thu Perret

    The artists Dirk Bell, Lisa Lapinski, Manuela Leinhoß, Melvin Moti and Mai-Thu Perret pursue in very different ways their interests in cultural phenomena committed to the unconscious. From time to time they come into a dazzling conflict with their own critical position and a rationalistic view of the world. The exhibition Pure Self Expression contains installations, sculptures and paintings revealing an affinity to trade and handicraft items. On this formal level the works of art pose the question of authorship, which is again challenged by the referential charging of the objects.

    Since 1999, Mai-Thu Perret has been working on the fictional text The Crystal Frontier, a text about a group of women leaving the city in order to establish an autonomous commune in the desert. Banner, props, carpets or pottery emerge throughout the process, functional as much as inoperable objects, that are exhibited as objects of this anonymous group and are intended to reveal the psyche of this fictional group. The artist plays with the questions of authorship and describes herself so to speak as producer of a „Group material.“ For Pure Self Expression Perret produced two carpets and seven ceramic reliefs – two techniques connected with feminism and Hippie-culture. In contradiction to the rather cool appearance of the lacquered, monochrome reliefs, also the motives like eggs, chains, crystals and skulls speak for this ironic exaggeration.

    Lisa Lapinski’s sculpture Nightstand is composed of piled up furniture, drawers, cabinet doors, lost items and photos. Lapinski’s pyramidal composition follows formally the drawings of arbor vitae of the religious Shaker Communities in the 19th century. The used objects are also based on the style of furniture typical for the Shaker Communities and regarded as the forerunner of modern design. The space installation named „Nightstand“ is no decorative bedroom accessory, but instead gives the impression of a bulky arrangement, neither sculpture nor furniture, which as a whole, in spite of the conceptual interconnection of historical motives, creates an almost eerie, sacral atmosphere in space.

    Manuela Leinhoß’ sculptures are titled Zukunft beginnt noch nicht, Der Wille zur Lust, Forte oder Verhältnis ohne Gegenteil and reziprok are part of her playing with the incongruity of object, title and meaning. Her fragile objects made of hard plaster, leatherette, wood or paper seem to communicate with each other. She abandones perfection with precision, creates the impression of something home made and instable, thus setting herself deliberately into oeuvre. Personal experiences, texts of authors enter the titles of the works of art and enable possible associations for charging the formally reduced objects with a content, which, however, always remains ambiguous and indefinite.

    Dirk Bells’ paintings, drawings and collages with their ephemeral formal appearance refer to role models such as the Symbolists, William Blake or the drawings of Leonardo da Vinci. They seem to appeal in an almost excessive degree to the old concept of art as a dream world. Bell deliberately aims at formal and substantial connotations that at first look like a faux pas. In the installation at the Kunstverein these are for example Kitsh motives from popular-culture, teenager-rooms, but also the supercharging effect of light. He arranges a small altar, next to painting, drawings and objects creating the idea of diverse narratives. By painting on found paintings he, too, poses the question of a subjective filter, which every reception represents.

    The Film The Black Room by Melvin Moti combines a fictional interview with Robert Desnos about his experiments in automatic writing under self-hypnosis, done in the circle of Paris Surrealists in 1923, with a very slow tracking shot panning along the walls of the Roman Villa Agrippa near Pompeii. A place where grotesques were for the first time used as wall decoration. They represent the transformation from realistic illusion towards a new imaginary power and free representation of the world. The frescoes range from trompe l’oeil to magic. The question of how spiritual experience can be reconstructed and imparted is an important point of departure for Melvin Moti’s artistic work. In The Black Room imagination is shown as part of the psyche and the social reality, thus becoming a productive counterweight in times of fictionalization and virtualization.

    Dirk Bell (born in 1969, lives and works Berlin), Lisa Lapinski (born in 1967, lives and works in Los Angeles), Manuela Leinhoß (born in 1973, lives and works in Cologne), Melvin Moti (born in 1977, lives and works in Rotterdam) and Mai-Thu Perret (born in 1976, lives and works in Geneva and Berlin).

    The exhibition is kindly supported by:
    Sparkasse KölnBonn, die Botschaft des Königreichs der Niederlande, Pro Helvetia Schweizer Kulturstiftung und U.S. Consulate General, Düsseldorf/Amerika Haus

  • Exhibition: Der Springende Punkt: Happening and Fluxus, Kölnischer Kunstverein 1970, chosen and presented by Marcel Odenbach, 20.4. – 21.12.2007
    Motiv of the invitation „Happening und Fluxus“, 2007, Photo: Balthasar Burkhard 1970

    Archive series

    2nd floor

    In the form of an annually changing exhibition, The Key Point provides insight into the archives of institutions or individuals whose experimental exhibition programs or special curatorial signature provide important points of contact for the work of the Kölnischer Kunstverein.
    For the development of this series, a collaboration with an artist who has a special affinity to the selected institution is planned. The artist will be invited to research the archive material and develop a corresponding presentation. Thus, the aim is to select a particular moment in the history of this institution, which is of personal importance to both artists and curators, rather than to present a complete archive.

    The Cologne artist Marcel Odenbach is invited to participate in this exhibition. His long activity at the Kunstverein as an artist and member, coupled with his interest in the processing and reappraisal of history(ies), is an ideal prerequisite for dealing with this archive. The starting point of his research is the exhibition Happening and Fluxus from 1970, through which he first became aware of the Kölnischer Kunstverein. Not only his grandfather, but a large group of members from the south of Cologne left the Kunstverein in outrage on the occasion of the actionist, provocative exhibition. At the same time, a large group of young, new members joined the Kunstverein.

    Happening and Fluxus was already designed with a readiness for conflict in the selection of artists and in the type of installation. What is interesting about this exhibition and the events triggered by it is the question of the social role of art in the early period of the Bonn Republic, which is reflected in the public discussion of the exhibition by politicians and citizens, but also the question of Cologne as a city of art. Odenbach presents exhibition catalogues, editions, letters, photographs and other documents as a selection of materials that are intended to capture the historical moment from the perspective of the exhibition organizers Harald Szeemann and Wolf Vostell, the Kunstverein director Toni Feldenkirchen and the audience’s perspective.

  • Exhibition: Mark Bain und James Beckett – Museum of Noise, 3.3. – 20.5.2007
    Museum of Noise, announcement for the exhibition at the Kölnischer Kunstverein 2007

    As the new directors of the Kölnischer Kunstverein, Kathrin Jentjens and Anja Nathan-Dorn will be launching their programme with two young artists who are on the cusp between concept art, sound art and experimental music.

    In his installations, Mark Bain (born 1966, Seattle, USA) presents the self-oscillation of matter, particularly that found in architecture. By amplifying the seismographic oscillations of the ground or architecture either acoustically or using vibrators, he ultimately liberates the perception of space from the dominant form, namely observation. The viewing distance we have when looking at something is lost as a result of the physical or acoustic experience of architecture. Bain’s portrayals create an apparent contradiction – particularly through the material structures of our society – by dematerialising these by converting them into motion, sound and vibration. By presenting the machines used as minimal objects, he shifts the view from the world of products, which was so important for pop and concept art, to industrial devices, which dominate our everyday lives in a much more structural manner. With his work – which attacks, or topically addresses, architecture – and using industrial machines, he has already made himself a name internationally in the area of media art.

    James Beckett’s (born 1977, Harare, Zimbabwe) interest in sound developed from an initially more installation-oriented work and led him towards radio documentaries and working with museal displays. Of special importance within this context is the A Partial Museum of Noise project, which will also be on display at the Kölnischer Kunstverein. It documents the cultural and physiological effects of various forms of „noise“. The Industrial Revolution also plays an important role in his artistic research. The invention of synthetic dyes and its link to BASF, for example, or the cultural implications of vacuum cleaner tubes for the Dutch concern, Philips. When he tells these stories, which also question customary artistic media, such as colour and images, based on the representation of the personal sphere of experience, he strips them of their power over our everyday lives. In other works as well, Beckett transforms scientific standards and units of measurement and order into aesthetic ones and questions their indisputability in doing so.

    Bain and Beckett are characterised by an experimental approach to new technologies and media as well as a sensitive examination of specific places. For the exhibition at Die Brücke, both artists have developed works that deal with Wilhelm Riphahn’s building, which will also be an important starting point for our programme in the future. To this end, Beckett will duplicate architectural models of the Cologne-based architect, who deals with the vocabulary of modernism as if it were Lego. Mark Bain will amplify the character of the exhibition space as a display cabinet for the city by making the vibrations of the window glass audible. In doing so, he will transmit sounds from the inside to the outside and vice-versa. Also on display will be Partial Museum of Noise by James Beckett and a new version of the Feed carnivore video work by Mark Bain, which works with a fear-provoking super-positioning of television images. With their work, both artists question the principles of social organisation in terms of traffic, industrialisation, engineering and mass media. To this end, they touch on central topics for the future development of western democracies, which will also play an important role in our curatorial programme.

2006
  • Exhibition: Cameron Jamie, Peter Kogler, Kurt Kren – Keine Donau (No Danube), 4.11. – 17.12.2006
    Peter Kogler, No Danube, Kölnischer Kunstverein 2006. Installation view, photo: Manuel Gorkiewicz

    The exhibition Keine Donau (No Danube) unites three generations of artists and relates their works to one another. Cameron Jamie and Peter Kogler have integrated works by the underground filmmaker Kurt Kren, who died in 1998, into their jointly developed exhibition focusing on the interrelationships between art, film and architecture. Experimental films by Kurt Kren, who is considered one of the most important representatives of the international film avant-garde and a pioneer of structural film, are shown in a dialogue with the most recent spatial works by Peter Kogler and work by the American artist Cameron Jamie.

    The title of the exhibition is taken from the film „Keine Donau“ by Kurt Kren. A radical and confrontational questioning of the medium of film and a close analysis of perception are characteristic for Kren’s film work. He developed his films from the very foundations of cinema – movement, material, light and perception – and experimented not only with light and perception, but also with technical equipment. Kurt Kren’s vibrant and dynamic pictorial language is shaped by extremely quick cuts based on scores of serial, structural and mathematical character, multiple exposures, bluring, manipulation of soundtrack, resulting in a new form of image and perception.

    In the installation developed by Peter Kogler one of Kurt Kren’s most important structural films, „48 Heads from the Szondi Test“, is seen in dialogue with a new work by Peter Kogler and studies for the film „Spook House“ by Cameron Jamie. Beginning of the 1980s Peter Kogler had already started experimenting with the then newly emerging computer technologies and with these tried to find new ways of artistic expression. Starting from the conceptual experiences of Pop Art in dealing with mass media, with the idea of the serial and new reproduction technologies Kogler has since the early nineties been developing „virtual“ image worlds that are projected onto bodies and spaces, in which the boundaries between image, sculpture, architecture and media seem to be suspended. His transformations of all-encompassing signs, images and spaces point a perfect permeation of public and private spheres with these signs and an ultimate merging of the two.

    Cameron Jamie’s works are marked by the phenomenon of fantasy and subcultural experiences in urban, American suburbs and European popular culture. American backyard wrestlers, spook houses or other eerie theatrically staged productions dealing with death, denial, fear and violence are only a few of the rituals of everyday culture that Cameron Jamie explores with his art. He focuses on the effects of these ritual practices on the psyche and everyday life and on their inherent imaginings and poetry.

    In addition to film works, the exhibition Keine Donau also shows drawings, sketches, frame plans, objects, and a sculpture produced especially by Cameron Jamie together with the woodcarver Max Kössler for the exhibition. The exhibition also includes a selection of Actionist films by Kurt Kren, made in collaboration with his artist colleagues Otto Mühl and Günter Brus.

    Of the interplay between different artistic positions results an exhibition on transgressions and expansions of boundaries. It reflects on uncanniness and the abysmal in our society, whose representation in everyday life can suddenly evoke an irritating and anxious dimension.

    The night version of the exhibition also cancels out the boundaries between interior and exterior space, when the window front of the large exhibition room „opens up“ to the street and the works by Cameron Jamie, Peter Kogler and Kurt Kren shine out into the city. This is also a reference to the great cinematic tradition of the Kunstverein building.

    Cameron Jamie, born 1969 in Los Angeles, lives and works in Paris.
    Exhibitions (selected): Whitney Biennale, New York (2006); MUKA, Antwerp (2005); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2006); Venice Biennale (2005); Bernier/Eliades Gallery, Athens (2005); Magasin/Musée Gó-Charles, Grenoble (2004); Artangel London (2003); The Wrong Gallery, New York (2003); Galerie Christine König, Vienna (2003); Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2002); Rotterdam International Film Festival (2001); Stedelijk Museum, Ghent (2001).

    Peter Kogler, born 1959 in Innsbruck, lives and works in Vienna.
    Exhibitions (selected): Museum of Modern Art, New York (2006); Casino Luxemburg, Luxembourg (2005); Galerie Mezzanin, Vienna (2005); Museum für angewandte Kunst, Vienna (2004); Galerie im Taxispalais, Innsbruck (2004); Kunstverein Hannover (2004); Galerie Crone, Berlin (2004); Bawag Foundation, Vienna (2003); Venice Biennale (2003); Schauspielhaus Frankfurt (2002); Villa Arson, Nice (2002); Fondation Beyeler, Basel (2001); Kunsthaus Bregenz (2000); Ars Electronica, Linz (1999); documenta X, Kassel (1997); documenta IX, (1992).

    Kurt Kren, experimental filmmaker, 1929–1998, lived in Houston/Texas and Vienna.
    Participation in international film festivals beginning in the mid-1960s. Internationally regarded as one of the most important underground filmmakers; numerous exhibitions, including documenta, Kassel (1977); Kölnischer Kunstverein (1977); Hayward Gallery, London (1979); Retrospective, Museum of Modern Art, New York (1979); Secession, Vienna (1996); Atelier Augarten, Vienna (2006).

  • Exhibition: Sanja Ivekovic – General Art. Selected Works 1974-2006, 1.9. – 15.10.2006
    Sanja Ivekovic, Novi Zagreb, 1979/2006

    Sanja Ivekovic is regarded as one of the most important artists of a ‚middle’ generation. In addition to an extensive retrospective of her work, the exhibition at the Kölnischer Kunstverein will also show a selection of her recent works. On first impression the photographs, videos, objects and performances, that Sanja Ivekovic has created since the mid-seventies, seem to follow the laws of a glamorous pop culture. For instance, in „Double Life” from 1975 Sanja Ivekovic contrasted conventional icon-like magazine and advertising photos of women with private pictures of herself, in which the related gesture compels a comparative and reflexive reading. Inscribing herself as a person and thus the private into public discourse, in her work Sanja Ivekovic pursues the question of how the routines of everyday life are influenced by the dictate of fashion, advertising and the star cult. At the same time, for the artist the body is always only the body in the representation – an image surface dominated by the gaze. Sanja Ivekovic purposely exposes herself to the male gaze, emphatically placing the body, sexuality and gender in the context of the political. In her most recent works she also refers to the collapse of former Yugoslavia, the ethnic cleansings, the living conditions of refugees and women’s anti-fascist resistance.

    The exhibition has been realized in cooperation with the Galerie im Taxispalais, Innsbruck, where Sanja Ivekovic’s first comprehensive solo exhibition was shown in 2001.

    Discussion
    The artist will be having a discussion with Marie-Luise Angerer, media theoretician, Cologne; Sylvia Eiblmayr, art historian, Director of the Galerie im Taxispalais, Innsbruck; Nataša Ilic, art historian and curator of the exibition, Zagreb; Bojana Pejic, art historian and curator, Berlin; Charles Esche, Director of the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (invited).
    Wednesday October 4, 7 pm

    Film evening
    On the occasion of her exhibition, Sanja Ivekovic will be presenting a selection of her video works from 1974 to 2003 at Die Brücke.
    Saturday October 7, 7 pm

    Thanks go to: Sylvia Eiblmayr, Galerie im Taxispalais, Innsbruck. In 2001, Sylvia Eiblmayr presented the first comprehensive sole exhibition of the works of Sanja Ivekovic. A large part of these works will also be on display at the Kunstverein.

    Loans provided by: Generali Foundation collection, Vienna; Block collection, Berlin; Kontakt. Die Kunstsammlung der Erste Bank-Gruppe, Vienna; Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna; Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb.

    Sponsors: Privatbrauerei Gaffel, Becker & Co.; Kunsttrans, Zagreb; Mireille Ruch („Der Blumenladen”, flower store, Cologne); MACtac Germany; VPS, Krefeld; City of Cologne.

  • Solo Exhibition: Jutta Koether – Fantasia Colonia, 26.5. – 13.8.2006

    Jutta Koether is one of the central figures in contemporary painting. But she is more than a painter. She is also a performance artist, musician, writer, critic and theorist.
    Her role as an artist was long reduced as a feminist response to the Cologne scene of the late 1980s. With her translucent color fields, gestural brushstrokes, drawings of female bodies, and lyrical appropriation of poetry and art history, she often seems to take the opposite position to artists such as Martin Kippenberger, Sigmar Polke, and Albert Oehlen. However, as a critic and editor of the music and pop culture magazine Spex, as well as a performance artist and musician, Koether did not correspond to the typical job description of the art scene of the time.

    Since the beginning of her artistic career, Jutta Koether has tried to make expansion her program. In doing so, it was always important to her not to take on a clear role as an artist, but always to work from several positions. Since she came to New York in the 1990s, she has been moving in an expanded field of experimentation and improvisation, literature and theory of the New York scene. Collaborations with musicians like Tom Verlaine (Television) or Kim Gordon (Sonic Youth) are often more important for her as inspiration than the works of visual artists. It is precisely through these apparent detours and alternative forms of energy that she has created a kind of free space for herself over the years, which in today’s situation enables the urgently needed reassessment of the medium of painting and its potential.
    The exhibition at the Kölnischer Kunstverein is Jutta Koether’s first major solo show in Germany and presents for the first time a comprehensive selection of her work since the mid-eighties. With paintings, drawings, texts, video works and installations, Jutta Koether occupies all the rooms of the Kunstverein. She combines her various forms of expression with one another, creating experimental arrangements from which a flowing dynamic and openness develops.

    A comprehensive catalogue will be published by DuMont Verlag to accompany the exhibition. Texts by Diedrich Diederichsen, Isabelle Graw, Martin Prinzhorn, Michael Kerkmann and a conversation with Jutta Koether, Sam Lewitt and Eileen Quinlan explain Jutta Koether’s various areas of work. The catalogue with 160 pages contains about 160 colour illustrations and is published in German and English.

  • Solo Exhibition: Clemens von Wedemeyer, 4.3. – 7.5.2006

    “Art and cinema”, according to Clemens von Wedemeyer, “are different languages that are related to one another. I am interested in both languages. Both of them together make it possible to find a practice that provides new spaces for new investigations.”

    In his first major solo exhibition Clemens von Wedemeyer shows works from recent years. With the selection of works he explores a direction while simultaneously establishing references to the architecture of the Kunstverein building, which is regarded as one of the outstanding architectural monuments of the 1950s and is devoted to art and cinema.

    To exemplify his interest in cinema, Clemens von Wedemeyer shows his early cinematic work “occupation” (2002). A large number of extras and a film crew come together at night in an unidentifiable location. The extras are confused by the film crews’ unclear instructions, and the film crew, which is busy tiredly and fearfully exhausting all the means of cinema, reacts the same way. With “occupation” Wedemeyer detached the audience, the film crew and the technical apparatus from its conventional (film) context, placing them in an absurd situation reminiscent of Beckett. The extras unwillingly and unwittingly become the main figures, the film crew operates like marionettes following an unwritten script. In the exhibition Clemens von Wedemeyer shows “occupation” for the first time as a 35mm film in the cinema, the consideration of which was its starting point.

    Extracting a situation and transferring it to a new context is also found in Wedemeyer’s exhibition design. Transfered from the cinema situation to the exhibition space, the exhibition architecture designed by Clemens and Henning von Wedemeyer functions like the structure of a film. The exhibition walls serve as a division, as incisions between the different zones. “In cinema,” says Wedemeyer, “the division (the cut) is crucial. Fiction results as a division between the areas.”

    The video work “Silberhöhe” (“Silver Heights”) appears to be removed from place and time, even though it is based on the scene of the “Silberhöhe” tower blocks in Halle, which were built between 1979 and 1989 for 40,000 residents and have lost over half the inhabitants since 1989. The camera follows the emotionally charged streets and looks into a model flat, where the credits from Antonioni’s “L’eclisse” are running on a flickering television screen. By citing the camera work and editing technique of the concluding scene from Antonioni’s film, the video transports the drama that does without people into the current situation of the decaying city district, thus creating a mental line between the two ends of the period of time, in which urban utopia was developed, built, lived and ultimately abandoned.

    “Otjesd” deals with bureaucracy and waiting, telling of the fate of a young woman in the midst of a border region. Both films appear as though from an in-between world, in which the images do not allow surrendering to an illusion, even though they are far from documentary. This is more the way an absurd fairy-tale or dream is experienced.

    In a space that Wedemeyer has inserted between the two projection spaces, it becomes clear how much fiction is needed to convey subjective realities. On display here are the genesis of the films, Wedemeyer’s preoccupation with the open, not yet defined space at the urban peripheries in East Germany, research at the visa application offices in Berlin and Moscow, and observations of a real film crew. I

    The room opens up a view of the city of Cologne, thus also establishing an architectural connection with the apparently real of everyday life.

    Finally, in the basement of the Kunstverein, another reference to Beckett shows up with “Ohne Titel (Rekonstruktion)” [“Untitled (Reconstruction)”] from 2005. What can be seen here is the “false” reconstruction of a dance, which Clemens von Wedemeyer filmed during a rehearsal of the dancer and choreographer Alexandre Roccoli during his solo work at the Villa Arson in Lyon. “Ohne Titel (Rekonstruktion)” is virtually a study of movement in film, in which the space and the body are shifted in an elementary way into the center, taking on an immediate, physical presence through the subsequently developed sound (with Thomas Wallmann).

    The film works “occupation”, “Silberhöhe”, “Otjesd” and “Ohne Titel (Rekonstruktion)” were filmed by the cameraman Frank Meyer.

    Biographical Information
    Clemens von Wedemeyer, born 1974, lives and works in Berlin and Leipzig. Exhibitions (selected): PS1 Contemporary Art Center, New York (2006); Berlin Biennale, KW, Berlin (2006); CAC Brétigny-sur-Orge (2006); Galerie Meyer Rieger, Karlsruhe (2005); Kunsthalle Bremen (2005); Galerie Klosterfelde (2005); Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art (2005); Galerie für zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig (2005); Kunstwerke Berlin (2004); Galerie Jocelyn Wolff, Paris (2003).

    Catalogue
    A catalogue will be published for the exhibition with essays in German and English by Ekaterina Degot and Beatrice von Bismarck.
    The catalogue will be presented on May 5th at 7 pm in conjunction with the exhibition discussion.

    Film Evening
    To accompany Clemens von Wedemeyer’s exhibition, Matthias Müller (filmmaker, Bielefeld/Cologne) has compiled a selection of experimental films, which will be shown on April 28th at 7 pm at the cinema in the “Brücke”.

    Exhibition Discussion
    Alexander Koch (curator and author, Berlin) in discussion with Clemens von Wedemeyer, following which Clemens von Wedemeyer will present a new film “rien du tout” (with Maya Schweizer).
    5 May, 7 pm

2005
  • Exhibition: Projekt Migration, 30.9.2005 – 15.1.2006

    It is the gaze that determines whether and how we see migration. It is the perspective of the nation that makes the people who cross the border into the others: Strangers who must be explored and understood, repelled and controlled, used and integrated. Whether with empathic attention, economic pragmatism or racist exclusion: the nation needs the others to put itself at the centre. This is how the narrative of the majority and its minorities comes about.

    The “Project Migration”, initiated by the Federal Cultural Foundation, stands for the attempt to reverse this view and make migration visible as a central force for social change.
    The Kölnischer Kunstverein is the sponsor of the project. Project partners are DOMiT, Documentation Centre and Museum on Migration in Germany e.V. for the perspective of social history, the Institute for Cultural Anthropology and European Ethnology at the University of Frankfurt/Main and the Institute for Theory of Design and Art (ics, HGK Zurich) for the perspective of science.

  • Solo Exhibition: Trisha Donnelly (CENTRAL-Kunstpreis), 25.6. – 4.9.2005

    For the fifth time, the CENTRAL Health Insurance Company in cooperation with the Kölnischer Kunstverein awards the CENTRAL Art Prize for international artists. With the previous prize-winners Rirkrit Tiravanija (1996), Douglas Gordon (1998), Ernesto Neto (2000) and Florian Pumhösl (2002) the CENTRAL Art Prize has achieved an outstanding reputation within the fine arts scene, which is now continued with the nomination of Trisha Donnelly. Trisha Donnelly was nominated by an international jury consisting of Chen Y. Chaos, chief curator at the Millennium Art Museum in Peking, Hans Ulrich Obrist, curator at the Musée d´Art Modèrne de la Ville de Paris, and Beatix Ruf, director of the Kunsthalle Zürich. With the promotional prize amounting to Euro 75.000,- , in addition to its collection of contemporary art, the CENTRAL Health Insurance Company clearly signals its attention to the most recent trends in contemporary fine art, contributing to its development with active support. The CENTRAL Art Prize enables the prize-winner to spend half a year in Cologne to work on the realization of a new art project, which will be presented in summer 2005 in an exhibition at the Kölnischer Kunstverein.

    In Trisha Donnelly’s work the ephemeral, the incidental often plays a special role. The basis for her work Rio from 1999, for instance, is a sunset. In this video work Trisha Donnelly stands sideways in relation to the camera, while a colored lamp behind her creates the impression of an artificially staged home-made sunset. A song is heard that was written to convey a sunset to a blind person. To the sound of this song with its Latino rhythms, Trisha Donnelly apparently begins to translate the lyrics of the song into sign language. One might think that she is communicating the atmosphere of the music to an imaginary deaf person, who is able to see the artificial sunset but not hear the song. Yet instead of translating the lyrics of the song word for word, she gives directions for finding the way to an idyllic location in the mountains of Rio de Janeiro. For the normal viewer who does not understand sign language, she hides this message, but still we are captivated by the way the light, the music and Trisha Donnelly’s gestures interweave into a kind of mystical dance that draws from a peaceful yet penetrating expression.

    In comparison, some of her other works appear uncanny, almost foreboding. In Night is Coming (warning) from 2002, the statement “night is coming” that flashes again and again against a white background simply announces the coming of nightfall, reminding us of how time passes. Yet the constant, flickering repetition inevitably sparks the viewers’ imagination. It raises the question: “Do we fear the night or welcome it?” The impression can ultimately intensify to the point of an ominous portent.

  • Solo Exhibition: Cezary Bodzianowski – Ein und Aus, 18.2. – 1.5.2005

    The polish artist Cezary Bodzianowski, who has recently been distinguished with the renowned Polish Art Prize (Polityka), is an unusual artist, who is still too little known outside Eastern Europe. One reason for this lies in the resistiveness, with which his artistic work rejects the expectations and the tendencies to appropriate and categorize that are found in an international exhibition practice increasingly oriented to the laws of the art market.

    This rejection is expressed not only in his choice of performative intervention as his preferred artistic medium. The transience of this chosen medium also corresponds to the transience of the actions or the situations that he creates in this way. Some of his interventions go completely unnoticed, others have chance observers; they are rarely directed to a – pre-informed- audience that expects them and can put them into an art context. The basic rules of performance do not apply to Bodzianowski’s work. He is not concerned with duration, has no fear of long passages, does not worry about the audience or a spectacular finale. The countless actions take place almost entirely unnoticed by the art business and independent from it, as a kind of expression of a daily artistic necessity. What they all share is the intentional limitation to the simplest means, which also makes it possible to spontaneously react to found situations. In “Good Morning” (Lodz, 1997), for instance, he came across a crane as he was taking a walk at seven in the morning and talked the driver into lifting him in the crane cage to the windows of the fifth floor of a tower block. He knocked on the windows, waking the residents, greeting them and leaving his regards to wish a good morning to all the other residents.

    Special examples for his poetic, subversive interventions, as well as his skepticism with regard to conventional exhibition practices are found in contributions to exhibitions to which he has been invited. For his part in an exhibition in a gallery in Lublin in 1997, he persuaded the staff to lock themselves in the gallery during the opening hours of the exhibition, unplug the computers and telephones and stop working. In the meantime, the artist took a long walk through the sunny streets of Lublin. On another occasion (“Nattahnam”, Galeria Manhattan, 1996), the artist’s participation in the exhibition consisted of spending a day in the flat of the family living above the gallery and doing his best to fit into their everyday life.

    What Cezary Bodzianowski’s interventions have in common is the way they overcome “natural” contexts of meaning, as they are compellingly set by habit and routine. The assertion of alternative readings of what is seemingly assured harbors a subversive potential in a society, whose self-understanding is substantially based on the unambiguousness and incontrovertibleness of what is generally agreed to be true. Although this subversive potential is overlaid with the great poeticalness of the interventions, it is specifically inscribed into critical awareness through this immanently poetic pictorialness lastingly and ineradicably.

    Most of Cezary Bodzianowski’s interventions and actions have been documented by his wife, the photographer Monika Chojnicka, with simple remembrance photos. A selection of these documentations, which have a strong poetic and pictorial aura, will be shown for the first time as part of the exhibition at the Kölnischer Kunstverein. Cezary Bodzianowski will comment on the documentations in a performance on Friday, 18 February at 7.30 p.m. and on Saturday, 19 February at 6 p.m.

    Cezary Bodzianowski, born 1968, lives and works in Lodz, Poland.

2004
  • Exhibition: Jahresgaben 2004, 1. – 23.12.2004

  • Solo Exhibition: Cosima von Bonin – 2 Positionen auf einmal, 29.10.2004 – 16.1.2005

    2 Positions at once is what Cosima von Bonin calls her exhibition at the Kölnischer Kunstverein – her first major solo show at a Cologne art institution. 2 Positions at Once is actually 300 positions or more: the exhibition brings together installations, paintings, objects, performances and films of equal value, and is about a multitude of stories and social relationships with other artists and musicians, about individual memories and the rejection of the idea of the isolated artist subject.

    Together with friends, Cosima von Bonin used an object-like space she designed during the exhibition setup as a set for performances and photo shoots. The artist conceived this space as a wooden container and strange-looking receptacle for living environments, in which during a performance people wearing animal masks, their dogs, a cloth-covered catamaran and a group of young people were involved with each other in improvised but also in previously determined scenes. All actors wear fashion designed by Kazu Huggler from the upcoming spring/summer collection chidori. The music is by the group Phanom/Ghost (Dirk von Lowtzow and Thies Mynther).
    The performative staging has given the place a narrative charge, although the traces of the actors seem to be wiped away after the performance. The result is a film that is shown in the exhibition and reunites the processes of the performance.

    The pictures and works in the other exhibition space also function like allusions, providing a comprehensive insight into Cosima von Bonn’s working methods of recent years. It seems as if they too are part of a plot and tell of various individual and collective stories. At the same time, however, the individual objects also claim their autonomy through their strong pictorial qualities detached from the context of the installation. Model-like, poetic spaces emerge, full of references and complex systems of relationships made up of memories and associations, which Cosima von Bonin constructs at the Kölnischer Kunstverein and in which her own social framework also becomes the subject of the art.

    In addition to the Zurich fashion designer Kazu Huggler and the music group Phantom/Ghost, other artist friends of Cosima von Bonin are involved in the exhibition, including Ulla von Brandenburg, Nina Braun, Julia Horstmann, Tellervo Kalleinen, Annette Kelm, Almut Middel, Thomas Ritter, Roman Schramm, Hanna Schwarz, Dejan Mujicic, Jörg Schlürscheid, Akiko Bernhöft, Manfred Hermes and Da Group.

    A catalogue designed by Cosima von Bonin and Yvonne Quirmbach is published by Buchhandlung Walther König. In a loose sequence of scenes, he documents in numerous large-format illustrations the installation and performance that took place during the construction of the exhibition. The illustrations are accompanied by a text by Manfred Hermes. The catalogue, with approx. 140 pages, is published in German and English and contains approx. 200 colour illustrations.

    During the exhibition, the Cologne fashion store “Heimat” shows films from Parisian fashion shows in the cinema in the “Brücke”. On show will be “the quintessence of fashion, beyond the usual catwalks. Ten designers, ten shows. In unabridged form and otherwise reserved for a professional audience…” (Andy Scherpereel and Andreas Hoyer).

  • Exhibition: Deutschland sucht..., 17.7. – 19.9.2004

    Artists: Nevin Aladag, Thomas Bayrle, Henning Bohl, Heike Bollig, Ulla von Brandenburg, Andreas Brehmer/Sirko Knüpfer, Michael Buthe, Helmut Dorner, Jeanne Faust, Julika Gittner, Asta Gröting, Niels Hanisch, Myriam Holme, Viola Klein, Seb Koberstädt, Michael Krebber, Svenja Kreh, Kalin Lindena, Daniel Megerle, Anna Kerstin Otto, Manfred Pernice, Marion Porten, Mandla Reuter, Evelyn Richter, Eske Schlüters, Stafeta, Lee Thomas Taylor, Stefanie Trojan, Danh Vo, Gabriel Vormstein, Clemens von Wedemeyer, Herwig Weiser, Tobias Zielony, plucked violin production.

    Selected by: Ariane Beyn (Berlin), Anja Dorn (Cologne), Peter Gorschlüter (Düsseldorf), Iris Kadel (Karlsruhe), Chistiane Mennicke (Dresden), Nina Möntmann (Hamburg), Vanessa Joan Müller (Frankfurt am Main), Julia Schäfer (Leipzig), Judith Schwarzbart (Munich)

    The exhibition Germany is searching intends to provide an insight into current tendencies of new art in Germany.
    With the aim of creating the widest possible open framework, nine curators from different regions of Germany were each invited to nominate three young artists. These should be little known or not yet established in the art scene, yet their work should be significant to current developments in contemporary art.
    In addition the curators each proposed an established artist to provide a historical or artistic reference, who could contribute to a clarification of the works chosen.
    The conceptual openness of the exhibition, the approach which spans generations, as well as the absence of any excluding thematic stipulation, allows a variety of work to be considered. Being exhibited together makes possible a discussion about consensus and differences.

    The exhibition title Germany is searching refers to political and social present-day Germany, and intends to reveal the context from which German art is emerging or has emerged. Not only economically and politically, but also mentally, Germany seems at the moment to be searching for its role in a fundamentally changed world.
    This search for identity is at present increasingly reflected in various television programms, newspaper commentaries and discussions. Against this background “Germany is searching” poses the question whether new developments, themes and methods of works are becoming apparent in the production of contemporary art in Germany, and how these are perceived by a generation of young curators.
    The work of 40 artists will be shown, which as well as using a variety of media like painting, installation, film, photography and objects, develop extremely different ideas in form and concept.

    The exhibition was conceived by Jens Hoffmann (Director of Exhibitions ICA,London) and Kathrin Rhomberg (Kölnischer Kunstverein).

    Germany is searching has been made possible by the generous support of Aloys F. Dornbracht GmbH & Co .KG Iserlohn.
    Dornbracht, internationally active as a producer of designer bathroom fittings, accessories and interiors, has since 1996 regularly documented its image as a concern with cultural competence. Its commitment to culture falls into three categories: the Limited Statements Edition assembles many-sided interpretations of bathing rituals and bath culture and offers an international forum to the participating artists. The works are documented in variable medial forms, and presented internationally in exhibitions and galleries. Co-operation with the Kölnischen Kunstverein started in 2000, within the framework of the Dombracht Installation Projects, an annual exhibition series, which presents artists active in the field of installation . With Dombracht Sponsorship the medium-sized company also supports international exhibitions and projects, and with its financial and personal commitment is recognised as one of the group of international art sponsors. In 1999 and 2001 Dombracht sponsored the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennial.

  • Solo Exhibition: Roman Ondak – Spirit and Opportunity, 1.5. – 27.6.2004
    Roman Ondak, Spirit and Opportunity, 2004. Photo: Boris Becker

    “As a sign of your solidarity with recent events in the world, we ask you not to interrupt the activity you are engaged in for the next minute.”

    When visiting a group exhibition, museum-goers regularly heard this message. Apparently, a museum guard had put his radio on a station whose spokesman with an Eastern European accent had repeatedly interlaced Roman Ondák’s sentence in the current news.

    To the museum visitors, the message entitled “Announcement” (2002) seemed like a sudden interruption of the museum’s everyday life. It was understood as an invitation to behave in a certain way and to become part of the exhibition itself through this performative act. This play with meaning, context and imagination is one of the central moments in Ondák’s artistic thinking.
    Roman Ondák thereby develops a great intimacy with people who are involved in them as observers or actors.

    For “Antinomads” (2000) Roman Ondák photographed friends, relatives and acquaintances who do not want to travel in their private surroundings. These photographs were reproduced as postcards and offered for free in exhibitions. Like all other postcards, they were purchased by tourists and sent all over the world. The “Antinomads” thus became world travellers in a paradoxical way, in that Ondák confronts the temporal and local standstill with a new option for action that combines both, local ties and mobility.

    As a close observer of our reality, Ondák records his everyday perceptions in the form of drawings and notes, from which he develops his artistic interventions, which, through shifts in context and poetic-looking stagings, feed back into the real world. By means of a constant and contradictory transfer of meanings, the introduction of unexpected actors into a place full of expectations, or the repetition of the same image in different media, he adds a sensitively disturbing counterweight to our habitual balance of perceptual processes, thereby unmasking our laboriously balanced collective construction processes of content, meaning and the emotions associated with them. Roman Ondák works with a wide variety of artistic media, such as drawing, performance, sculpture and installation.

    For his exhibition at the Kölnischer Kunstverein – Roman Ondák’s first major solo show – he is developing a sculptural in-situ work. Here too, an experiential space full of shifts, thresholds and unexpected outlooks is created. He juxtaposes reality with his own counter-concept of a world that becomes a poetic scene of secret, unpredictable, random behaviour and collective longings. The exhibition space takes on the materiality of a spatial object, which seems to be pushed into reality like a foreign body, but at the same time is inseparable from it.

    A comprehensive monographic publication with works by Roman Ondák since the 1990s will be published for the first time to accompany the exhibition. The texts are by Georg Schöllhammer, Igor Zabel and Hans Ulrich Obrist in German and English.

  • Solo Exhibition: Ann-Sofi Sidén – Warte mal!, 14.2. – 8.4.2004

    The Swedish artist Ann-Sofi Sidén shows “Warte Mal!” at the Kölnischer Kunstverein, a video installation about the German-Czech border region. Following the collapse of Communism and the opening of the borders in 1989, a new business sector developed at this geopolitical intersection: mass prostitution.

    Hundreds of girls from all over Eastern Europe work here as prostitutes, attempting to halt passing, usually German, cars by shouting “Warte Mal!” (“Wait a minute!”) – often the first words that the girls learn in German.

    Ann-Sofi Sidén spent a period of nine months in this city, creating a dense portrait with her hand camera, which is composed of various filmic components. The artist expands the documentary shots with architectonic, sculptural, photographic and performative dimensions into a conceptual whole and sets them in an interrelationship to one another in a spatial architecture. The manifold formal modes of expression enter into an interaction, resulting in a network of different perspectives and focal points that captivate us and grant insights into a closed, secret world that otherwise remains hidden.

    The exhibition is presented in conjunction with the Project Migration, initiated by the Federal Cultural Foundation, and provides an opportunity for a first artistic encounter with the theme of migration, which will be the focal point of the program of the Kölnischer Kunstverein for the year 2005.

    Biography
    Ann-Sofi Sidén was born in 1962 in Stockholm. She lives and works in Berlin.
    Exhibitions (selected): Musée d´Art de la Ville de Paris (2001); Berlin Biennale (2001); Villa Arson, Nice (2000); Venice Biennale (1999), Secession, Vienna (1999); “Nuit Blance”, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1998), Biennale de São Paolo (1998); “Zonen der Verstörung”, Steirischer Herbst (1997); “See What it Feels Like”, Rooseum, Malmö; Galerie Nordenhake, Stockholm (1995); “P.S. 1. Studio Artists 194″, P.S. 1, New York (1994).

2003
  • Exhibition: Jahresgaben 2003, 17.12.2003 – 25.1.2004

  • Solo Exhibition: Florian Pumhösl (CENTRAL-Kunstpreis), 11.10. – 14.12.2003

  • Solo Exhibition: Julius Koller – Univerzálne Futurologické Operácie, 19.7. – 21.9.2003

    Július Koller has „consistently developed his position up to the present day, and an oeuvre that in its stringency, obsession and peculiarity could well be called one of the most erratic and consistent of European contemporary art. It is perhaps most comparable with the universe of a Marcel Broothaer.“ (Georg Schöllhammer)

    The first international, comprehensive solo exhibition of Július Koller at the Kölnischer Kunstverein deals with attempts of a utopian appropriation of space in the course of striving for new creativity, imagination and greater freedom. It was conceived together with the young artist Roman Ondák, who will be represented with a solo exhibition at the Kölnischer Kunstverein himself in 2004.
    Július Koller regards his artistic practice since the mid-60s as a „cultural process“, in which the self-initiative of the subject that is to shape future-oriented, cultural situations has a special significance. With his projects he has inscribed this kind of step-by-step, active transformation of real life into reality.

    The exhibition shows a selection from Július Koller’s extensive work since the 1960s up to the present. It comprises text-pictures, objects, collages, photo works, manifestos and a video documentation.

    Július Koller, born 1939 in Piestany (former Czechoslovakia), lives and works in Bratislava.

  • Exhibition: Wir müssen heute noch an Ihr Vorstellungsvermögen appellieren…, 9.5. – 22.6.2003

    „On behalf of art we must appeal to the power of your imagination this very day to boldly and recklessly assert the space, into which you or we have pushed us. By what right, you will surely ask now.“erlich.

    Kamal Aljafari, Cezary Bodzianowski, Josef Dabernig, Halt+Boring, Sanja Ivekovic, Thomas Kilpper, Július Koller, Jiri Kovanda, Josh Müller, Roman Ondák, Anatoly Osmolovsky, rasmus knud, Hans Schabus, Werner Würtinger, Heimo Zobernig

    Our first exhibition in the “Brücke”, the new domicile of the Kölnischer Kunstverein, will open on May 9th, 2003. The title of the exhibition programmatically stands for discussions in recent months in conjunction with the search for a suitable space for the Kölnischer Kunstverein.

    In this context, the exhibition addresses fundamental questions that determined the protracted and controversial disputes involving the search for appropriate spaces for the Kölnischer Kunstverein; questions about the claims that art makes.

    How much and what kind of space is allocated to art in times, when “real” problems and the urgent necessity of dealing with them occur? To what extent and for which reasons do conceptions of reality and relevance alternate in times of an “exceptional situation”, and which possibilities does art have for intervening in the different conceptions of reality? Which of art’s individual possibilities of impact can be deployed, and how do these, for their part, shape the power of the circumstances or leave them untouched? Which significance is attributed to imagination? Is art capable of opening up “free spaces” for insights and convictions, which we do not yet know?

    The exhibition also stands for the unfinished, construction site state of the “Brücke”.
    As such it is an appeal to the power of imagination to replace all that is unfinished and the scaffolding that is still standing with the image of a completely renovated “Brücke”. Current developments have shown that the will of the Kölnischer Kunstverein to return the “Brücke” to the original state planned by Wilhelm Riphahn 1949/50 and thus to make the architectonic quality of the building visible again, can only be realized in a controversial process. Both the exhibition and the state of the building mirror this process, the building site becomes a metaphor for the current cultural political situation in Cologne.

    The renovation of the “Brücke” under the direction of the architect Adolf Krischanitz is defined by a radicality and straightforwardness committed to the architectonic quality and the historical context of the building. In his conception of the renovation work, Krischanitz consciously rejected any “temporariness”, in order to return to the building the materiality and identity that it had already lost. Exploring, uncovering and supplementing characterize Krischanitz’ processual renovation, which will become recognizable for the first time with the first exhibition in the “Brücke”. The focal point for this is the former reading room of the “Brücke”, which Wilhelm Riphahn already thought of as an exhibition space.

    The relationship between what is shown and the appeal to imagine what cannot be shown is the red thread through the film series put together by the artists Josef Dabernig and Deimantas Narkevicius, which will be screened in the cinema of the “Brücke”. With this film series, the Kunstverein, in cooperation with various partners, begins an intensive and exclusive use of the cinema in the “Brücke” as a program cinema. The film program thus enables an in-depth exploration of the positions and themes shown in the exhibition, and includes short films and feature films by Kurt Kren, Gerard Holthuis, Daniela Kostova, John Smith, Otto Zitko, Thomas Korschil, Hans Scheugel, Peter Watkins, Algimantas Maceina, Werner Herzog, Frederick Wiseman, Sarunas Bartas, David Lamelas.

1982