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until 25.04. | #2963ARTatBerlin | Galerie kajetan Berlin shows from 26th February 2021 the group show kajetan presents with selected works by seven artists of the gallery and two guest artists.
Due to the ongoing pandemic situation and the associated restrictions, Galerie kajetan Berlin has decided to postpone the exhibition “Erich has just the building. In memory of Erich Reusch”, scheduled for February 2021, will be postponed until next autumn. It will then be on view from September to November 2021.
In order to nevertheless be able to make a visual offer that does justice to this period, Galerie kajetan Berlin has decided instead to organise a group exhibition with works by artists represented by the gallery and to invite the artists Shila Khatami and Ingrid Lønningdal, whose positioning gallery owner Tobias Posselt considers very stimulating in this context, to take part as well.
On show will be:
Bettina Blohm, Carla Guagliardi, Shila Khatami, Ingrid Lønningdal, Marc Nagtzaam, Erich Reusch, Elisabeth Vary, Claude Viallat and Jan Wawrzyniak.
The exhibition brings together very different contributions close to the border to the nonrepresentational, by means of which forms of dealing with artistic processes of abstraction can be excellently worked out. Based on the relevance of the individual works, we have tried to clarify correspondences, connections or contrasts that form a powerful and at the same time sensitive whole, without, however, discrediting the individual work. kajetan Berlin cordially invites you to see and reflect on the actual result on site.
kajetan presents, Exhibition view 2021, from left to right: Claude Viallat, Shila Khatami, Carla Guagliardi, Elisabeth Vary,
Erich Reusch, Bettina Blohm, Courtesy the artists & kajetan Berlin, Photo: Marcus Schneider
While one of the small-format chalk drawings by the artist Bettina Blohm (*1961), which she regularly draws en plein air in a Berlin cemetery, tend to meander roughly between real landscape references, free form and intimate line, the architectural reference in the work Edges (Haus Feininger II) by the Norwegian artist Ingrid Lønningdal (*1981) can almost only be guessed at in terms of color. Lønningdal paints the borrowed forms onto a woven tapestry that dissolves downwards, whereby her artistic practice itself seems to correspond with the unifying ideas of the Dessau Bauhaus.
kajetan presents, Exhibition view 2021, from left to right: Shila Khatami, Elisabeth Vary, Carla Guagliardi, Ingrid Lønningdal,
Courtesy the artists & kajetan Berlin, Photo: Marcus Schneider
A different approach is pursued by the conceptual drawings of the Dutch artist Marc Nagtzaam (*1968), from whom we are showing the work Performing a collection – Variation 2020, which is derived from his collection of templates of book covers, posters or pictures, but reducing them beyond recognition and merging them together into independent, graphically structured new designs, which Nagtzaam reflects on again and again in a circular working process.
kajetan presents, Exhibition view 2021, from left to right: Ingrid Lønningdal, Marc Nagtzaam,
Courtesy the artists & kajetan Berlin, Photo: Marcus Schneider
In the centre of the exhibition we show a work by the French doyen Claude Viallat (*1936). A leftover cover – hanging from the gallery ceiling – of a former straw mattress (1987/105): on the one hand emptied and trivialized, on the other enriched and charged by his virtuoso painting, that is enough for and by itself.
kajetan presents, Exhibition view 2021, from left to right: Erich Reusch, Bettina Blohm, Elisabeth Vary, Jan Wawrzyniak, Claude Viallat,
Courtesy the artists & kajetan Berlin, Photo: Marcus Schneider
Erich Reusch’s (1925–2019) later painting, placed on the opposite, on the other hand, reveals in an almost exemplary way his early revolutionary ideas of decentralised sculpture and space as an existential factor. Conceived as a landscape, Reusch gesturally spreads out the (white) space between two (black) markings.
kajetan presents, Exhibition view 2021, from left to right: Erich Reusch, Bettina Blohm,
Courtesy the artists & kajetan Berlin, Photo: Marcus Schneider
Berlin-based artist Shila Khatami (*1976) is represented in the exhibition with two paintings: first, the work Slash Slash from 2018, shown in the entrance, in which the dominant entity of the double slash both emphasizes and undermines the painterly gesture; and second, the work ausradiert (erased) from 2017, in which the erasing function is not only a means, but the actual content of the artistic debate.
Shila Khatami, Slash slash, 2018, Acrylics, industry paint, varnish on canvas, 180 x 114 cm,
Exhibition view 2021, Courtesy the artist & kajetan Berlin, Photo: Marcus Schneider
Also emptied is the large-format, colorless Interieur (21002) by the artist Jan Wawrzyniak (*1971), which – slightly off-kilter – suggests spatial depth by suggesting the perspectives of a room in a two-dimensional way, but at the same time paradoxes and cancels them out again, creating an experience of unavailability: the path of vision as a visual dead end.
kajetan presents, Exhibition view 2021, from left to right: Erich Reusch, Bettina Blohm, Elisabeth Vary, Jan Wawrzyniak,
Courtesy the artists & kajetan Berlin, Photo: Marcus Schneider
We contrasted this work with one of the two small-format pictorial objects Untitled by the artist Elisabeth Vary (*1940), whose painterly, colorful and spatial presence is unparalleled. Shape, colors, surface, body, material quality, traces of processing – painting and sculpture culminate in each individual work.
kajetan presents, Exhibition view 2021, from left to right: Elisabeth Vary, Ingrid Lønningdal, Marc Nagtzaam, Erich Reusch,
Courtesy the artists & kajetan Berlin, Photo: Marcus Schneider
Last but not least, we asked the Brazilian artist Carla Guagliardi (*1956) for a new edition of her sculpture Gaspar (2007/2021). In Portuguese, Gaspar means “two gases,” and the white double balloons that the artist made available will float through the exhibition like a ghost, watching over it even when no one comes.
There will be no exhibition opening as usual. Please send enquiries to: info@kajetan.berlin. You can reach kajetan Berlin by phone at +49 (0)176 57792651. The gallery looks forward to welcoming you again soon.
Exhibition start: Friday, 26 February 2021, 11:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m., the gallery can be reached by phone and email in the office during our opening times
Exhibition dates: Friday, 26 February 2021 – Saturday, 17 April 2021 . ATTENTION: extended until Sunday, 25th April 2021
To the Gallery
Exhibition kajetan presents – Galerie kajetan Berlin | Zeitgenössische Kunst – Contemporary Art – Exhibitions Berlin Galleries | ART at Berlin
