Kathrin Rank + Frank Massholder | Mehr Meer | Galerie Z22 | 28.09.-28.10.2023

This is a very personal exhibition, closely linked to personal memories, experiences and imprints.

Katrin Rank paints, Frank Massholder photographs…

The ancestors of the Berlin painter Kathrin Rank come from the island of Sylt on her mother’s side and from Upper Franconia on her father’s side. Thus her mental cinema, conditioned by long stays at the North Sea and by the knowledge of ancestors as whalers and seafarers, has found pictorial expression in her work. Since 2015, Rank has been expanding her visual worlds of city views and has since allowed the elements to surge. Having been in an energetic state of tension since her childhood, the artist thematises the changing aggregate states of water – sea, snow, ice, fog, clouds … in her paintings. Symbols of dissolution and transitions from one state to another. The solid becomes fluid and solid again, a fundamental element of nature. Becoming and passing away.

The sea demands a physical and psychological confrontation with an elemental force that is sometimes perceived as exhilarating, sometimes as threatening. The North Sea, seldom lovely, rather agitated, corresponds to the temperament of the painter with its wave crests, its ambivalence and the desire for fear that the stormy sea can trigger. Painting as an act of doing, of process, of movement, panta rhei. Splashes of paint become spray, eruptive brushstrokes become waves, paint that flows becomes melting snow or puddles that seep into the sand. Her landscape depictions thus do not recreate paradisiacal states of nature, but are situations full of energy, interwoven with life, in which moments are staged that are fleeting. The alchemical mixing of the elements, from which nature emerges according to this doctrine, corresponds in a certain way to the mixing of colours and describes Rank’s painterly process of the elemental becoming of air and water – wandering ice floes, the approaching sea, storm-driven cloud formations. Layer after layer of paint, Rank allows the viewers of her paintings to participate in this creation, to become part of this energetic process.

Frank Massholder’s photographs are to be understood as a mourning work around the death of his father in 2011.
In memory of him, he walked his father’s favourite walk again and again, photographing the sea around Cap Ferat in the south of France every few metres. The results poetically and contemplatively reflect his feelings…

“OBSERVER”

In dreams, binoculars basically stand for the future.
History viewed through binoculars is the human capacity for appropriating time.

If the term “territory” is used metaphorically to denote something over which one has control, the binoculars are a figurative equivalent. A mental territory contains a conrolled, spatially limited area.
Zooming in on the distance, the unknown, the vastness gives the section a limited search field and thus appropriates the foreign.

With Rank’s series of binocular pictures called “OVSERVER” (15×25 each), the artist has been exploring this voyeuristic phenomenon for some time. A subject that she zooms in on with binoculars and appears in their eyepiece,

The beginning of this series was created during her 2019 residency scholarship in Shenzhen, China. The appropriation of the foreign, only possible in a small section, corresponded to these images in terms of content.

Seeing and being seen.
Being observed and looking back.
Looking through to see through something.
Appropriating the foreign, zooming in, giving it form.

Often the viewer, the user of the binoculars, approaches the object of desire in secret only with this aid and thus makes the coveted stranger his own. This anonymous, “hostile” takeover can be found in cinematic suspense situations such as in Alfred Hitchcock. This channelled gaze is , quite uncharacteristically, always associated with desires, hopes and ideals.

This volatile moment is given a framework, as a making-of of the perfidious moment.

Exhibition dates: Thursday, 28 September 2023 – Saturday, 28 October 2023