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until 01.07. | #3891ARTatBerlin | Galerie kajetan Berlin shows on 29. April 2023 (Opening: 28.04.) the exhibition Das weiße Ballett by the artist Jan Wawrzyniak.
“Is it necessary, then, to save the absence or the emptiness? Is it a matter of saving this nothingness at the heart of the image?” Jean Baudrillard (in: Why hasn’t everything already disappeared?) In his first solo exhibition at kajetan in 2019, the artist Jan Wawrzyniak presented almost oppressively emptied works under the title Forms of Aporia: They were predominantly large-format pictures, which in their impermeability to the viewer could hardly be called pictures and which remained largely indescribable. In his work, the image was just still an image, but no longer image enough to enable an experience of the image at all.
Jan Wawrzyniak, Das weiße Ballett, Ausstellungsansicht / Exhibition view, Galerie kajetan 2023, Courtesy Jan Wawrzyniak & Galerie kajetan, Photo: Marcus Schneider
Four years later, we are pleased to be able to show a second solo exhibition by the artist at kajetan, with which he emphatically confirms and sharpened this stance. Under the title Das weiße Ballett (The White Ballet), we present a series of unprocessed image carriers from 2022. In Jan Wawrzyniak’s work, the image body now takes the place of the image, which is no longer an image but only horror vacui and yet draws its reference from the artist’s previous work: from the work with slightly out-of-shape, irregular image formats, from which the image and the world have been exorcised over time and which – choreographed – give rise to a fragile ensemble of undrawn images.
Jan Wawrzyniak, Das weiße Ballett, Ausstellungsansicht / Exhibition view, Galerie kajetan 2023, Courtesy Jan Wawrzyniak & Galerie kajetan, Photo: Marcus Schneider
Jan Wawrzyniak has spent many years visually confronting the critical experience of existence. The current state of this confrontation can be seen in our exhibition. The pictures themselves have disappeared, but the picture supports dance in celebration of their existence. The grin still hovers in the room after the cat has left it. (Lewis Carroll) What remains of it are unmarked blank panels and a wooden frame blackened with graphite, positioned against and with each other, subtly marking the exhibition space.
Jan Wawrzyniak, Das weiße Ballett, Ausstellungsansicht / Exhibition view, Galerie kajetan 2023, Courtesy Jan Wawrzyniak & Galerie kajetan, Photo: Marcus Schneider
In the interplay of the different formats, their subtle shifts and staggerings, Jan Wawrzyniak succeeds in creating a dynamic, colourless, almost poetic ensemble whose corresponding pictorial bodies cast lines of light and shadow gaps onto the walls of the room, enabling ideas of moving spatial constellations and of spatial depth, of half-spaces and spatial shifts. The crisis is omnipresent and in this it is no longer perceptible. The crisis has outlived itself. In this sense, it is only logical that Jan Wawrzyniak turns the radical negativity of his undrawn images into a choreographed space: into a white (images) ballet without images.
Jan Wawrzyniak (*1971 in Leipzig, GDR) is an artist living in Berlin and Vestjylland (DK). In 2011, Jan Wawrzyniak was awarded the Will Grohmann Prize of the Berlin Academy of Arts. His works have been shown in various museums, including the Kunstmuseum Bonn, the Museum Wiesbaden or the Museum Pfalzgalerie Kaiserslautern and are in numerous public and private collections. He is currently founding umbrella | west coast exhibitions, a non-profit space for contemporary art in Lydum (DK), which will open in June 2023.
Opening: Friday, 28. April 2023, 6:00 pm – 9:00 pm.
Exhibition dates: Saturday, 29. April – Saturday, 01. July 2023
Special Opening Hours:
Gallery Weekend Berlin 2023 | Saturday and Sunday, 29. and 30. April 2023, 11:00 am – 7:00 pm
Galerierundgang Charlottenwalk | Friday, 2. June 2023, 6:00 – 9:00 pm
Caption: Jan Wawrzyniak, Das weiße Ballett, Ausstellungsansicht / Exhibition view, Galerie kajetan 2023, Courtesy Jan Wawrzyniak & Galerie kajetan, Photo: Marcus Schneider
Exhibition Jan Wawrzyniak – Galerie kajetan Berlin | Zeitgenössische Kunst – Contemporary Art – Ausstellungen Berlin Galerien | ART at Berlin
