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until 29.01. | #3259ARTatBerlin | FeldbuschWiesnerRudolph (FWR) currently shows sculptures and drawings by the artist Wim Botha, paintings by GL Brierley and a large video work as well as photography by Augustin Rebetez.
” (…) And what we know is that things are out of balance and that we are probably way too late to bring them back into balance.”
Judith Hermann, 2021
Indeed, it will take a while after the pandemic for all sorts of strangeness to become a new home. Narratives like those of Judith Hermann’s novel “Daheim” describe the courageous arrival of a new place that offers security. In which the memories have no objectivity, but the now is obvious. In fact, it is often poetry and art that create these new worlds infant of our eyes….
Wim Botha, Prism 36, Me and You, You, Bronze, 2021
The autumn exhibition presents three international artists of the gallery, whose main question is that of the existence of man. It is transformed in the obvious processuality of their works of painting, drawing, sculpture photography and film.
“(…) For many people this moment was an opportunity to rethink what it means to be human, what it means to be in this time and this place.”
Wim Botha
Wim Botha (b. 1974 in Pretoria/ SA; lives and works in Cape Town) is widely known for his paper busts since his presentation at the Venice Biennale (2013). In Berlin, the artist also shows busts in bronze with a warm brown patina as well as sculptural works turned from walnut wood. Their eroded form seems to allude to their taking shape beyond linear time. In fact, they are not individual portraits, but rather silhouettes that undergo a dynamic change of form as they are walked around.
Wim Botha, Installationsansicht FeldbuschWiesnerRudolph, 2021
Botha’s title “Proposal for transient radical form” is also reflected in his drawings with black ink on paper, whose interrupted line constellations seem similarly detached as Botha’s oil paintings with their isolated punctual settlements on raw canvas. Thus, all of the artist’s works generate from a transient nature to take on a physical form for a moment while representing the idea of an eternal, formless presence.
“Though this carnivalesque revelry feels like a dark courting of danger, a Dance Macabre there is something deeply atavistic in the human celebration of life in the face of death.”
GL Brierley
London-based painter GL BRIERLEY (b. 1964 in Glossop, Derbyshire (UK); lives and works in London) experienced the orgiastic excess of release with Dionysian overtones with the festival Lockdown in her hometown of Hackney. For the artist, the River Lee and the green spaces find parallels in the mythological River Styx as the threshold to the underworld.
GL Brierley, Untitled, Katabasis, 2021, Oil on pannel, 80 x 90 cm
Life and hope often lie close together within darkness, and so GL Brierley experiments for her paintings with the pouring of paint on the carriers of wood and aluminum. In an alchemical manner, the changeable play of partial coagulation of paint, liquid mixtures, and dramatic incidences of light create the illusion of an inner space in which still-life-like objects and chimera-like beings meet. In these settings, the atmosphere of the painting oscillates between abstraction and figuration, seduction and horror, humor and the grotesque.
“We are ghosts trying to become visible. We like rituals. We believe in shadows and whispers. We work for the night.”
Augustin Rebetez
Augustin Rebetez (born 1986 in Delemont/ CH; lives and works in Mervelier) is an artist and director who conquered the art scene with his stop-motion films. He enchants our all-too-cultivated world with his powerful, sometimes provocative but always artistically poetic labyrinths populated by figures half human, half animal, half organism, half object.
Augustin Rebetez, Throw Your Shadows, 2019, HD video channel, 13 min, Ed 3
The gallery will feature an elaborate three-channel video projection of the film “Throw Your Shadows,” for which the artist received the Swiss Art Award in 2019. It is an immersive experiment for which Rebetez draws from dream images, primal religions and an esotericism that could have originated in the Jura as well as Africa or Oceania. The film’s individual images are based on painting, sculpture, lighting and photography, while the jerky visual rhythm and soundtrack of bruitist music and concrete sounds gradually draw his viewer in.
Augustin Rebetez, Untitled, Print Hahnemühle, 60 x 40 cm, Ed 6
Currently Augustin Rebetez is on tour to present his book “Coeur entre les dents – Manifeste primitif”, for which he received the Alfred Latour Prize in 2020 awarded by a distinguished jury. We show single photographs from the book.
Exhibition period: Saturday, 13th November to Saturday, 18th December 2021 – ATTENTION: extended until Saturday, 29th January 2022
To the Gallery
Image caption title image: Wim Botha (Sculpture) + GL Brierley (painting), Installation view FeldbuschWiesnerRudolph, 2021
Exhibition Wim Botha, GL Brierley + Augustin Rebetez – FeldbuschWiesnerRudolph | Contemporary Art – Exhibitions Berlin Galleries – ART at Berlin
