English
Deutsch
until 15.04. | #3819ARTatBerlin | Galerie Thomas Schulte presented since 18. März 2023 the exhibition “FOUR WINDS” of the artists Angela de la Cruz, Richard Deacon, Hamish Fulton and Franka Hörnschemeyer.
The group exhibition Four Winds at Galerie Thomas Schulte brings together works by Angela de la Cruz, Franka Hörnschemeyer, Richard Deacon and Hamish Fulton. Using different media and approaches, the exhibited works explore intangible traces of memories, fleeting actions and materials. A vinyl wall text by Hamish Fulton, attached to the large window panes of the Corner Space and visible from afar from the street, complements the artworks in the gallery.
At the age of 27, Hamish Fulton made the decision to “make art that results only from the experience of individual walks”. Since then, each of his artworks has emerged from direct physical engagement with a particular landscape in a particular space. In an effort to leave as few traces as possible in nature, Fulton composes texts from carefully selected words in combination with graphically reduced forms and symbols, translating the experiences of his walks into large wall texts or small-format drawings, photographs and woodwork.
The wall text – or in this particular case “window text” – entitled Free Tibet is affixed to the three large window panes of the gallery’s Corner Space. It alludes to the artist’s circumambulation of the Ramoche Temple, the Jokhang Temple and the Drepung Monastery in Lhasa, one year before the Beijing Olympics. The Jokhang Temple in particular, and the street surrounding it called Barkhor, are a symbolic centre of Buddhism and Tibetan protest, showing that walking for Fulton is a unifying experience for a wide range of concerns: “slow transport, health, meditation, protest, escape, pilgrimage, ritual, dance, art…”.
The two wall drawings from Richard Deacon’s Bamako Twins series, which also capture memories of movement and exploration, were inspired by walks in Mali’s capital. While trying to find his way around the city on his walks, Deacon began to create mental maps, using the city’s monuments as key points. These mental maps form the basis for the shape of the drawings’ complex polygons. They are “twinned” by the overlapping of two or more drawings. Despite the two-dimensionality of the medium, these drawings bear striking similarities to Deacon’s skeletal sculptures. This series of steel sculptures, which he has been working on since 2008, embodies the basic idea of his art that sculpture is defined not only by volume but rather by emptiness.
Franka Hörnschemeyer defines sculpture as “the exploration of unexpected relationships between materials” and considers all living things, including herself, as a form of material. In her work, she often uses building materials and modular systems to create spatial structures that explore the processual and correlative nature of space. In doing so, she considers matter on an equal footing with space and refrains from treating them differently in any way. Installed on the gallery wall are three of her sculptures, which consist of movable aluminium plates attached to each other with hinges. The technically precise constructions capture the momentary relationship between matter and space, allowing surface reflections and the oscillation of shadows cast by the objects and the visitors.
Scattered around the gallery are several colourful, crumpled canvases that, upon closer inspection, reveal themselves to be discarded paintings – Mini Nothings by Angela de La Cruz. De la Cruz typically uses painting in a way that does not conform to standard painterly practices, deconstructing its components and treating them like sculptural objects. The crushed canvases take on anthropomorphic features as they pulse with the quiet tension left behind by the energetic action of which they are the remnants.
One of the recycled canvases is placed under a chair. The title Nothing Under a Chair refers to Bruce Nauman’s 1965-68 work A Cast of the Space Under My Chair, in which Nauman cast the underside of a chair in cement. The reference to a work that explores how negative spaces can be given form highlights Angela de la Cruz’s profound fascination with the traces of a past presence – something shared by all four artists in the Four Winds exhibition.
Opening: Friday, 17, March 2023, 7:00 – 9:00 pm
Exhibition dates: Saturday, 18. March to Saturday, 15. April 2023
Zur Galerie
Caption Title: Richard Deacon, “Bamako Twins #1”, 2009, Grafito, 270 x 165 cm | 106 4/16 x 64 15/16 in
Exhibition FOUR WINDS – Galerie Thomas Schulte | Zeitgenössische Kunst in Berlin | Contemporary Art | Exhibitions Berlin Galleries | ART at Berlin
