EXHIBITION PAINTINGS
Duration: 04.02 - 17.04.2017
Artists: Charles Avery, Paolo Chiasera, Dorothy Miller, Martin Pohl, Lea von Wintzingerode, Amelie von Wulffen
Curator: Christiane Rekade
In the last few years various artists have stepped back to study painting in depth as an expressive means, with all the possible alternative approaches to this medium. They see in painting a possibility of emancipation from actual working conditions. Working conditions that are ever more specified by the accelerated and market driven situation in the exhibition business. The group show ‘exhibition paintings’ gathers the works of six international artists, who recognize the potential of painting in order to rethink the exhibition format, to illuminate the relationships between curator, artist and the public – and in particular to show an alternative to the contemporary situation.
While Charles Avery, Paolo Chiasera and Martin Pohl use painting to conceive new exhibitions (or have them curated by someone else) that only take place on canvas, Dorothy Miller, Lea von Wintzingerode and Amelie von Wulffen investigate in their works the delicate mechanisms and relations between the artist and their audience.
Since 2010 the Italian artist Paolo Chiasera has been working on a series with the title exhibition paintings. They are as the title says, “paintings of exhibitions”, that is to say exhibitions realised on canvas.
The British artist Charles Avery also takes up the notion of the Musée Imaginaire in his work series It Means, It Means! (2013) and takes further considerations of the exhibition as a place of artistic and curatorial production.
In contrast to Avery’s fictive museum, the exhibition rooms in the paintings of South Tyrolean artist Martin Pohl are recognisable as actual museum spaces: in the completely white rooms, reminiscent of computer renderings in their precision, of selected museums and institutions from the Pinakothek der Moderne, München to the Götz collection and the Museum der Moderne in Salzburg, the artist paints his own not (yet) existent works.
The work series The Americans for example consists of 13 painted covers of historical exhibition catalogues. The catalogue covers were painted by an anonymous artist and presented under the pseudonym Dorothy Miller. Dorothy Miller was curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from 1934 to 1969 and is considered to be one of the most influential people in the development of modern American art.
The young artist Lea von Wintzingerode also finds in painting a possible reaction to an art orientated towards quick legibility and digital representation. In her work the artist focuses on the relationship between spectator and image.
Amelie von Wulffen employs painting and drawing in order to capture a rarely talked about “image of exhibitions” with self-irony and an inclination to exaggeration: in her comic, consisting of sketch-like pencil drawings, von Wulffen describes the fears and fantasies of the artist and her life (or survival) in the art world.
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Foto Installation
