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until 29.10. | #3700ARTatBerlin | The showroom of galerie georg nothelfer presents from 15 September 2022 (Opening: 14.09.) the exhibition cccc.
Collage – although a medium as old as the last century – seems to be the medium of the hour. In the ubiquitous copy-paste gesture, everything can be combined with everything else, as long as it can be received in the mode of the pictorial. And since the visual fragmentation of reality has progressed to almost infinity, it seems impossible to perceive the individual particles in context. We only see the splinters of the mirror cabinet in whose shards we have multiplied. The resulting reflex of a culturally pessimistic lament, however, fails to recognise how much our perception has changed in the course of technological evolution; with our newly acquired polyfocality, we permanently turn reality into building blocks of what artists have sought and continue to seek in collage.
“The chance meeting of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table” was once the phrase borrowed from the poet Lautréamont, which became famous for describing surrealist beauty and created, as it were, a coherent image for what was called collage a few years later. But it was not so much coincidence that was at work as the desire to create a new polyphonic sound from the clash of the disparate.
In the process of collage, finding and collecting the material is just as important as rearranging and connecting it. Artists become archivists of their found objects, they preserve and sort, they systematise and classify the raw material, be it photography, a text fragment, or a certain type of textile that finds its way into the composition.
Ausstellungansicht Galerie Georg Nothelfer. Foto: Katrin Rother
Collage allows us to distance ourselves from principles such as singularity, rationality or homogeneity. A uniform formal and mono-medial narrative is thwarted, a synthesis of the assembled can arise under certain circumstances – but does not have to. Collage is the reference to the coexistence of an alterity, a visible rupture, a scar that gives the body a new identity.
The historical evolution of this new pictorial practice runs along an axis that begins with Picasso’s and Braque’s Cubist collage, which broke open pictorial space to play with plastic and textual elements, to the Italian Futurists. From the anarchist-dadaist and political collage of Schwitters, Hausmann and Höch in the 1920s to the aforementioned Surrealists, who saw in collage a correspondence to the alogical and contradictory zones of the subconscious, and on to the protagonists of Pop Art in the 1950s and 1960s up to the present day of a digital image world.
Ausstellungansicht Galerie Georg Nothelfer. Foto: Katrin Rother
The exhibition cccc – where the 4 letters stand for collect, cut, compose, cobble – verbs that all describe different processes of collaging – presents seven very different artists whose practice encompasses collage.
Beginning with Michael Buthe (1944-1994), who combined the most diverse elements and influences in his oeuvre, from European Informel and American Minimalism to the experiences of longer stays in North Africa. Collage assemblage and painting become the forms of expression of his strongly heterogeneous life worlds.
Ausstellungansicht Galerie Georg Nothelfer. Foto: Katrin Rother
Nadine Fecht’s (1976, Mannheim) work is situated in the broader field of conceptual drawing and traces the socio-political force fields, structures and movements to which the individual is exposed. Her collage sheets are material searches whose gesture always reflects the formal but overwrites it in its charged content. An interplay of disturbing signals that challenge our desire for legibility.
Gerhard Hoehme (1920-1989), a central voice of post-war German art and a native of gestural abstraction, was increasingly concerned with new forms of pictorial field, moving away from two-dimensionality towards the expansive use of sculptural elements such as nylon cords.
Elmira Iravanizad (1987, Tehran) works with material from the depths of the subconscious, which she translates into drawings, cuts out and partially paints over. In this way she creates layers of abstract elements whose poetic charge is rooted in a formal order.
Lucia Kempke’s (1988, Xanten) complex hybrid objects tell of the longing for adventure, travel and conquest, but also of the desire for a fixed place to anchor oneself. Proximity and distance are reflected in a playful investigation of materiality.
Ausstellungansicht Galerie Georg Nothelfer. Foto: Katrin Rother
Miriam Salamander (1991) reflects on the possibilities of space and material when she encloses thread drawings in handmade paper, allowing the membrane of the paper to shine in its translucidity.
Jan Voss’ (1936 Hamburg) oeuvre explores the field of possibilities between the poles of order and chaos. Elements are distributed in highly accumulated relief pictures made of the most diverse materials, whether wood, paper, watercolour scraps or canvas: coloured abstract forms emerge, gestural, script-like ciphers or geometric objects and structure the picture surface, movement and weight are always held in a relationship of tension to each other and balanced.
Vernissage: Wednesday, 14 September, 6.00 – 9.00 p.m.
Exhibition dates: Thursday 15 September – Saturday 29 October 2022
To the gallery
Image title : Ausstellungsansicht Galerie Georg Nothelfer. Nadine Fecht. Foto: Katrin Rother
Exhibition CCCC – galerie georg nothelfer | Zeitgenössische Kunst Berlin Contemporary Art | Exhibitions Berlin Galerien | ART at Berlin
