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until 15.06. | #4286ARTatBerlin | Galerie Schindler in Potsdam presents from 25. April 2024 the exhibition GAIA with new works by the artist Birgit Klerch.
Birgit Klerch – Gaia
Worlds collide in Birgit Klerch’s paintings: both in terms of painting and content. Under the title “Gaia”, a reference to the mythological personification of the earth, the artist shows natural landscapes and floral still lifes. In these, she makes use of classic subjects from art history and, after a brief irritation, leads them towards a new horizon of meaning, which draws explosive new perspectives from the conservative theme.
Birgit Klerch, Green, 2024, Oil on Canvas, 140 x 160 cm
The tipping point is marked first and foremost by the painterly dissolution of the motif. What initially appears to be painted realistically crumbles into a skillful interplay between finely painted sections and their abstract counterparts, paint flows and drips across the canvas, is splashed or squeegeed. Some areas of the picture are painted through to the last detail, while others remain vaguely blurred. The atmosphere that the artist imbues her landscapes with through sometimes unusual color combinations is also diffuse to unsettling.
Birgit Klerch, Wiedehopf, 2024, Oil on Canvas, 70 x 60 cm
n the second instance, it is the motifs themselves that prove to be “wrong”. Taken from our everyday lives, we forget that landscape as we know it is by no means nature, or even landscape. “Humanity” would be the title we would have to give it, nature is nowhere to be found here.
Instead, we have left our traces everywhere, we ourselves have shaped our idea of the world to such an extent that we hardly know nature as such anymore. And not just since yesterday: even Caspar David Friedrich’s romantic places of longing no longer show untouched nature, but mountain tops deforested by man.
Birgit Klerch, Ortolan, 2023, Oil on Canvas, 70 x 60 cm
Nevertheless, the good news is that Gaia, Mother Earth, is not lost – but we need to break out of our mental molds in order to leave behind the destructive strategies of the Anthropocene, i.e. the first epoch in which humans irreversibly influenced the Earth. Bruno Latour provides an outlook in this regard. In his collection of lectures published in 2023,1 he states that in order to free ourselves from the ecological crisis, we must learn to understand that humans and nature are one entity and not two different living environments. Rather, we also belong to a large network that spans the entire earth – Gaia. According to this Gaia hypothesis, which was first formulated in the 1970s,2 the entirety of all organisms, i.e. the biosphere, forms its own form of living being that keeps the conditions on the earth’s surface in a finely balanced equilibrium.
If we change our perspective and see ourselves as part of this meta-organism, then there is hope, according to Latour’s conclusion – not a bad outlook, especially when it is as colorful and expressive as in Birgit Klerch’s paintings.
Anne Simone Kiesiel, art historian
1 See Bruno Latour: Kampf um Gaia, Acht Vorträge über das neue Klimaregime. Translated from the French by Achim Russer and Bernd Schwibs, Berlin 2023 (Paris 2015).
2 Cf. James Lovelock, Lynn Sagan: Atmospheric homeostasis by and for the biosphere: the Gaia hypothesis In: Tellus. Series A. Stockholm: Interna<onal Meteorological Ins<tute. Vol. 26, No. 1-2, 1974, pp. 2-10.
Vernissage: Donnerstag, 25. April 2024, 18:00 Uhr
Ausstellungsdaten: Donnerstag 25. April bis Samstag 15. Juni 2024
Bildunterschrift Titel: Birgit Klerch, Befreit, 2024, Oil on canvas, 120 x 100 cm
Exhibition Birgit Klerch – Galerie Schindler | Zeitgenössische Kunst in Berlin | Contemporary Art | Exhibitions Potsdam Berlin Galleries | ART at Berlin
