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until 28.10. | #3980ARTatBerlin | KLEMM’S presents from 15. September 2023 the exhibition “Kombi” by the artist Bernard Piffaretti.
Bernard Piffaretti (b. 1955 in St Etienne, lives in Paris) belongs to the central positions in the field of conceptual, contemporary painting. Since the late 1980s, his work has been determined by the idiosyncratic principle of repetition – the establishment of the ‘image double’, which finds its unity on the canvas.
The intellectual starting point of Piffaretti’s new solo show at Klemm’s, is a playful yet distanced reflection on the once emblematic and still popular function of the ‘Kombi’ (Kombinationswagen) and the possibility offered through its multiple uses to discover the world. Piffaretti combines this concept both spatially and temporally over the course of the exhibition with the idea of a traditional “Cabinet of Curiosities”: his painterly repertoire can be explored by the viewer in a wide variety of ways – right down to the ‘iconographic’ margins of his canvases.
In Kombi, Bernard Piffaretti proposes a personal collection – a ‘painting cabinet’ – of his own paintings, in which his works are exhibited, as it were, as ‘rarities’ and ‘curiosities’; anchored per se in the author’s consciousness and memory, they also acquire a certain familiarity with the viewer through the reiterated gestural expressiveness of their creative act. It is not without a certain irony that the artist seems to place himself in a role traditionally associated with that of the collector: through this peculiar exhibition display, subjective virtues and values are ascribed to his pictorial archive – and it is precisely the critical questioning of uniqueness, of this original ‘moment of surprise’, that has been a constant basis in Piffaretti’s very own ouevre.
Opening: Friday, 15. September 2023, 6pm – 9pm
Exhibition dates: Friday, 15. September – Saturday, 28. October 2023
To the Gallery
Image title: Bernard Piffaretti, Kombi, 2023
Exhibition Bernard Piffaretti – KLEMMS | Zeitgenössische Kunst in Berlin | Contemporary Art | Ausstellungen Berlin Galerien | ART at Berlin
