Final Exhibition

Seeing exhibitions in different venues like the German Guggenheim or Kunsthaus Tacheles in Berlin combined with the experience of exhibiting at concerts and galleries as well made me more innovative when preparing the studio for the final exhibition. I don't think I was fully aware of how important the structure and feel of a place is crucial in preparing an exhibition before. I have also learnt that pristine white gallery is not always the ideal space for exhibiting certain types of work.

I think that significantly thanks to Alice’s pieces and the way she placed them within the studios we managed to use the building to its full potential. Disjointed pieces 'scattered' around the building make the exhibition flow somewhat smoother. The room that Alice and I share in the exhibition works amazingly well. The way her Door piece fills the clean white room enhances my wall piece in the small store room which we left 'untidy'. The setup supports both pieces and strengthens the element of unknown in them.

In relation to my own work, I wanted to take full advantage of the studio setting. Because the four paintings I am exhibiting were intended as a set, I envisaged them on a plain vast white wall to maximise the impact of the colour and composition. I believe I have achieved that.  

Cities in cities

My experience with street art has primarily been finding yet another pointless graffiti on the front door. However, after the visit to Berlin I became more intrigued. Especially because of a certain artist calling him/herself EVOL. The blocks of flats could be considered a significant landmark of eastern Europe. They can be found in every city. By creating these miniature versions of them, using stone slabs around German cities, the artist creates a fascinating juxtaposition of these symbols of tight living conditions in European cities.

http:/www.evoltaste.com/

Brighton Palermo Remix

David Batchelor's latest site- specific light installation in the Regency Town House combines the building’s period architecture with Sicilian street festival decoration. Batchelor is known for his fascination with colour and the urban environment. This combination of everyday city themes and importance of colour makes Batchelor's work very relevant to me. After attending his talk at the Old Courthouse, where he read passages from his book Chromophobia in which he opposes the suppression of colour in western culture by artists and theoreticians, I realised how contradictory his approach to colour is.  On one hand he ridicules the urge of modern artists and theoreticians to control colour and jokes about the "black & white contemporary art", and on the other hand he mainly uses ready- made coloured lights that come in 6 colours, household paint and already coloured everyday objects from pound shops. When asked about this restricted palette, the artist himself said that sometimes it is "nice" to restrict oneself in the colour matters. I guess the power of colour remains undeniable.

Hamburger Bahnhof

Hamburger Bahnhof is a rail station, converted into "Museum für Gegenwart" (Museum for Contemporary Art).

The space of the main façade loggia and corridors leading to the wings of the ground floor is occupied by an installation of neon light tubes, designed by American artist Dan Flavin specifically for the building.

Architektonika displays sculptural and photographic works, films and paintings that illustrate different approaches to the relationship between art and architecture since the 1960s. It emphasises the sculptural and visual qualities of architectural structures. Because of the way it deals with how architecture defines urban space, the way we live and the relationship between architecture and social issues, this exhibition was the most valuable experience in Berlin.

Andrea Pichi- Doublebind, 2011

Isa Genzken- New building for Berlin, 2001
 

Isa Genzken- Brunnen, 1989

Perceiving Berlin

THIS COULD BE HOME

The spatiality of the city feels somewhat overwhelming. The modern buildings seem authoritative. Historical buildings are graceful. All the colours, textures and structures seem familiar. The subtle greys, beiges and browns, the glaziers' putty in the station windows, the people… All of this makes me realize I am attached to the continent more than I thought. The streets, shops and galleries don’t try to sell an essence of the character of the city- they are formed by it. 

THE BAUHAUS ARCHIVE

The security at the Bauhaus archive adds to the sacred aura surrounding the artefacts from the dawn of modern design. The building of the archive itself represents modern utopias better than any of the objects in the museum. Designed by W. Gropius the founder of Bauhaus, it doesn’t really feel real from the outside. The whiteness of the “building of the future” appears as a vast paper monument of modernity.

KUNSTHAUS TACHELES

Partially demolished building, originally called Friedrichsstadtpassagen was built as a department store in the Jewish quarters of Berlin. Today, the building accommodates an artists collective who named it Tacheles, Yiddish for "straight talking.” All the walls are covered in graffiti. Activist slogans, private messages, illustrated weed lyricism… everything overlaps on the concrete canvas of the building. The layers of loud bold outbursts cover everything.

THE HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL

Designed by an U.S. architect Peter Eisenman, this vast stone structure occupies approximately 19 000 square meters of space near the Brandenburg Gate, only a short distance away from the buried ruins of Hitler’s bunker. It consists of 2711 stone monoliths of unique sizes; some of them are only knee high while others tower over people walking through the memorial. The mute slabs of tragic legacy create a feeling of instability and disorientation.

Controlled chaos

Jeff Depner’s geometric abstractions could be considered an analysis of the relationship between form, colour and space. Architecture and contemporary culture significantly influence his visual language. Depner uses muted urban colours, which invoke associations to institutional and industrial buildings. Although his paintings look graphic and flat, they comprise of several layers. In an interview for Artbox Magazine (Issue 19, 2012), Depner states that these layers occur naturally, as a part of the process of getting rid of information that is not crucial to the composition. Even though architecture appears to be at the core of Depner’s work (observable through the series of photographs on his website), his expressive painting style with seemingly accidental paint drips, scratches and traces of brush strokes make his work, as the Canadian artist puts it, “open-ended” for the viewer to enter it.  

www.jeffdepner.com

The Art of Tidying Up

 

Swiss artist and comedian Ursus Wehrli exposes our obsession with order by positioning objects in neat rows according to colour, size, shape and category. This may seem like a rare type of OCD; nonetheless, The Art of Tidying Up shows what happens when ordinary scenes and objects are given an extreme reorganization in fascinating series of photographs. Wehrli previously applied his comical editing skills to the messy world of art, tidying up Vincent Van Gogh's bedroom and bringing order to Pieter Bruegel's chaotic village scene in his books Tidying Up Art (2005) and More Tidying Up Art (2007).

 

Alice’s crit: “The door”

An ambiguous image of a burnt door is projected on the wall. Deafening sound accompanying the installation creates a very disturbing atmosphere in the darkened studio. It belongs to a projection of a hand, which seems to be banging on the door. This image is layered with a pattern of a curtain, hanged on a wooden frame in front of it. Absorbing this staged situation, it is very tempting to make up narratives. There is something very eerie about this piece. 
However, the fact that we can see all the elements of the installation (including the empty pseudo door frame with the curtain, the amp and projectors..) suggests, that this piece does not want to create an illusion of something, it does not want to confuse, it is clear that it is a very intense report of some sort. The scale of the hand banging on the door, the ambiguity of the projected image of the door in combination with the strident sound, all of this on a loop, speak of an exaggerated moment in time, a very strong experience and terror. 

Home sweet home

The theme of nationality and the homeland is a reappearing one in Slovak art. The urge to embrace the surroundings and identities is somewhat coded in Slovak art and literature. However, Lucia Tallova (born 1985), Slovak painter of the young generation (she graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava in 2011) approaches this ‘Slovak myth’ differently. Following the tradition of Slovak Modernism pioneers, there are no heroic romanticised Slovaks at work, no enthusiastic folk landscapes, only sober love-hate relationship with the city, the country, with home. 

http://www.luciatallova.com/