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until 12.10. | #4382ARTatBerlin | ChertLüdde (Potsdamer Str.) shows from 11. September 2024 the duo-exhibition by the artists David Horvitz and Ali Eyal.
On the occasion of Berlin Art Week 2024, ChertLüdde will open the reception of the double exhibition by David Horvitz and Ali Eyal in the pop-up location ChertLüdde Potsdamer Straße (formerly Edition Klosterfelde) on Wednesday, September 12th. On Sunday afternoon, September 15th, a poetry event will take place in the exhibition.
In their two-person exhibition A new garden from old wounds (a line in Maria Sledmere’s poem ‘Deciduous’), artists David Horvitz and Ali Eyal explore geographic and conceptual distances. Held in the gallery’s temporary exhibition space on Potsdamer Strasse, the show delves into the boundaries of memories and emotions to investigate how fragmentary elements can come together to form a new reality.
In one of David Horvitz’s newest artworks in the exhibition, he continues his exploration of time by presenting a series of recycled glass vases made in memory of his grandmother, Irma. Irma was born in one of Berlin’s historically Jewish neighborhoods before emigrating to the United States on a steamship in 1913. The glass shards encased within these vases originate from the very street where she once lived and symbolically retrace the paths she might have walked over a century ago.
Exhibiting with the gallery for the first time, Ali Eyal’s distinctive painting technique is characterized by intricate accumulations of brushstrokes, as well as layered figures and text. These elements reflect a style he developed during his studies at the Fine Arts School in Baghdad before attending the Ashkal Alwan program in Beirut and the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam. His artworks, like the 2023 piece titled “You need to go back to page number ‘13’ to not understand anything, and,” embody fragmented narratives, where everyday objects serve as anchors for memories and life events. In these scenes, characters seem to merge with the background, representing a visual blend of their lived experiences and recollections.
A new garden from old wounds will be the artists’ first joint show in Europe following earlier collaborations in Los Angeles, where both artists are based. During Berlin Art Week, Hovitz and Eyal will also be organizing readings and poetic performances in their exhibition on Sunday, September 15th from 1-6 pm. ChertLüdde will activate this pop-up location on Potsdamer Strasse for the rest of 2024, opening its second exhibition this November.
BIOGRAPHIES
David Horvitz studied at the University of California and at the Waseda University in Tokyo. He obtained a MFA from Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Bard College, in 2010.
Witty and poetic, the work of David Horvitz meddles with systems of language, time and networks. Eschewing categorization, his expansive, nomadic body of work traverses the forms of photographs, artist books, performances, the Internet, mail art, sound, rubber stamps, gastronomy, and natural environments. His work examines questions of distance between places, people and time in order to test the possibilities of appropriating, undermining or even erasing these distances. Using image, text and objects, his works circulate and operate independently of himself, penetrating ever more effectively the intimate sphere. When encountering his works– in the postal system, libraries, or the airport lost and-found services– our attention to the infinitesimal, inherent loopholes and alternative logics, and the imaginary comes to the fore. Like lullabies impressed upon our minds, Horvitz deploys art as both objects of contemplation and as viral or systemic tools to affect change on a personal scale. Horvitz makes fictions that insert themselves surreptitiously into the real.
His work was exhibited in venues such as: High Line Art, New York; MoMA, New York; New Museum, New York; SF MOMA, San Francisco; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; HangarBicocca, Milan; Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary; Fotomuseum Winterthur; Albertinum, SDK, Dresden; Wende Museum, Los Angeles; La Criée centre d’art contemporaine, Rennes; S.M.A.K, Gent; Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen; MOCAK, Museum of Contemporary Art, Krakow; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Musée d’Art Contemporain Avignon; Crac Alsace, Altkirsch; Brooklyn Museum, among others.
Ali Eyal (b. 1994) is an artist working with painting, drawing, and video to explore the relationships between personal history, transitory memories, politics, and identity. Eyal is currently featured in Sharjah Biennial 15: Thinking Historically in the Present, Sharjah (2023). Eyal’s solo exhibitions include In the Head’s Sunrise, Brief Histories, New York (2023); In the Head’s Dusk, SAW Gallery, Ottawa (2023). Recent group exhibitions include, Is It Morning for You Yet?, the 58th Carnegie International, Pittsburgh (2023); Surviving the Long Wars: Reckon and Reimagine, Chicago Cultural Center (2023); Documenta 15, Kassel (2022); T heater of Operations: The Gulf Wars 1991-2011, MoMA PS1, New York (2020); How to Reappear: Through the quivering leaves of independent publishing, Beirut Art Center, Lebanon (2019). Eyal’s video work is included in the 22nd Biennial Sesc_Videobrasil: Memory is an Edition Station, São Paulo (2023); Rencontres Internationales, Paris; VITRINE x Kino Screenings, London; Sharjah Film Platform, Sharjah Art Foundation; and Cairo Video Festival, Medrar, Cairo. His works are in the collection of Kadist, Paris; Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah. Eyal earned an undergraduate degree from the Institute of Fine Arts, Baghdad (2015), he currently lives and works in Los Angeles.
Vernissage: Thursday, 12 September 2024, 6 – 9 pm
Poetry event: Sunday, 15 September 2024, 1 – 6 pm
Exhibition period: Wednesday, 11 September until Saturday, 12 Oktober 2024
Location: ChertLüdde, Potsdamer Strasse
To the Gallery
Image caption: David Horvitz & Ali Eyal photographed by Samar Al Summary during the filming of “California / كاليفورنيا” in California, 2024, Courtesy of ChertLüdde, Berlin and Ali Eyal, Los Angeles and David Horvitz, Los Angeles
Exhibition David Horvitz & Ali Eyal – ChertLüdde | Zeitgenössische Kunst in Berlin | Contemporary Art | Exhibitions Berlin Galleries | ART at Berlin
