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until 24.08. | #4300ARTatBerlin | Galerie Kornfeld shows from 21. June 2024 the exhibition Das jüngste Gerücht by the artists Franziska Klotz and Jan Muche.
From June 21, 2024, Kornfeld Galerie will present the exhibition Das jüngste Gerücht, which is borrowed from a cabaret program by Wolfgang Neuss from 1963. Paintings by Franziska Klotz enter into a dialogue with paintings and sculptures by Jan Muche.
What the two artists have in common is that they are inspired by images that have caught their eye. These can be documentation or images of historical events and works of art, but also digital or analogue images that illustrate current events. Their works are representational, but both often work with structures that make their pictures and sculptures appear almost abstract. For them, art is a means of relating to the world in which we live, of dealing with it and of questioning it. In their works, they take up topics that move them for very personal reasons, but which they also think are worth depicting because they tell us something about the world – the one in which we live, but also the one in which we perhaps like to live would. At the same time, for both of them, a picture, a sculpture is always a medium that follows its own, art-immanent laws and works with color, form, structure, line, surface and space. A work by Franziska Klotz or Jan Muche will always formally implement the chosen theme in such a way that we are encouraged to think about what is depicted in the work of art and ultimately about the world around us.
The new pictures by Franziska Klotz show teenage girls, alone or in small groups, but also chairs in the corner of a room, everyday objects such as an ice cube or a hot water bottle, a pier, broken and splintered windows or a crack in a street. What all of the works have in common is that, on the one hand, structures are emphasized, but these are out of order, especially in the different objects. Chaos and collapse can be found everywhere: the pier leans groaning to the side, withering flowers are trapped in the ice cube, the cracks in the panes form wonderfully chaotic network and lattice structures that create a mysterious new order, the chairs are stacked haphazardly on top of each other, in the There is a wide gap in the middle of the street, the previously smooth concrete is becoming cracked, and the protective cover of the hot water bottle is only barely held together by three wide straps.
Franziska Klotz, Courtesy Kornfeld Galerie
The teenagers also seem fragile, their arms and legs forming complicated patterns that are sometimes defensive, sometimes inviting. Occasionally they enclose certain parts of the picture like a frame, which are thus highlighted and emphasized. As “painful ciphers of the crisis in a phase of life between all odds,” says Ingeborg Ruthe, these images show “girls as they move on various social media platforms. Each on their own, but all connected by the same fears, doubts, insecurities.” United by the “virtual escape places in which the girls’ relationship to their bodies is analogous to the social structure – at the same time inverted and extroverted.”
In both groups of works, the inanimate objects as well as the teenage girls, the artist’s fascination with the disordered and chaotic is evident. The vague and ambivalent, the dark and the unfathomable or difficult to fathom are her themes. Anyone who likes can read her pictures as a commentary on a time in which existing orders and old certainties are dissolving and it is becoming increasingly difficult to find out what is true and what is just fake news.
Structures are also at the center of Jan Muche’s paintings and sculptures. The artist has long been fascinated by motifs from past (art) eras, especially the abstractions of the Russian Constructivists. In his current works, however, the seemingly architectural structures begin to dance. One could think of a picture by Fernand Leger that has gone out of control or a psychedelically alienated work by Willi Baumeister. And the constructive Vassily Kandinsky is sometimes not far away either. However, these art historical references probably only concern the formal vocabulary. The colors, as well as his style, the way in which the artist applies his colors, are clearly contemporary and always clearly recognizable as Jan Muche.
This also applies to Jan Muche’s figurative pictures. In the small canvas “Gesellen”, a dirty Pop Art version of a propaganda image for the heroism of hard, industrial work, the artist playfully combines the historical idea of an artistic departure to new, previously untrodden shores with the tangible political demands for a new person in a free society. A not only nostalgic fascination for the forms and ideas of this bygone era is characteristic of Jan Muche’s work. His sculptures, which look like models of utopian buildings that have yet to be realized, are also guided by the idea that art must be more than just a decorative element in space.
In “Das jüngste Gerücht” with Franziska Klotz and Jan Muche, the works of two artists from Berlin who apparently work in very similar ways are entering into a fruitful dialogue. In their representation of what was and what is, their works wonderfully resist the negation of meaning.
Franziska Klotz (*1979 in Dresden) was awarded the Max Ernst scholarship from the city of Brühl and, at the invitation of the Goethe Institute, worked for several months in 2015 and 2018 as a scholarship holder at the German Cultural Academy Tarabya in Istanbul. Her works are exhibited worldwide, including at the 56th October Salon in Belgrade (2016), in the Fanø Art Museum in Denmark (2017), in the Hamburger Bahnhof (2018), in the Kulturforum Schorndorf (2019) and in the Kunstraum Kreuzberg (2021).
After training as a lithographer, Jan Muche (*1975 in Herford) was a master student of K. H. Hödicke at the University of the Arts in Berlin. His works can be seen in exhibitions around the world, including at the Marta Herford (2020), the Torrance Art Museum in California (USA, 2020), the Haus am Lützowplatz in Berlin (2017) and the Wuhan Art Museum in China (2009).
Vernissage: Friday, 21. June 2024, 6 – 9 pm
Artist Talk: Friday, 12. July 2024, 6:30 pm, Asia Wolf in conversation with Franziska Klotz and Jan Muche
Exhibition period: Friday, 21. June until Saturday, 24. August 2024
To the Gallery
Bildunterschrift: Jan Muche, courtesy Kornfeld Galerie
Exhibition Franziska Klotz and Jan Muche – Galerie Kornfeld | Zeitgenössische Kunst in Berlin | Contemporary Art | Exhibitions Berlin Galleries | ART at Berlin
