Galleria Nove
Perspective / Curated by Drew Hammond
Pablo Alonso, Heiner Franzen, Emanuele Becheri, Adrian Lohmüller, Joep van Liefland, Jia,
Oliver Laric, Gregor Schneider, Ai Weiwei, Renata Kaminska, Michael Kunze, Philipp
Lachenmann,
Sarah Lüdemann, Meghan Tomeo
13.12.12 - 31.01.13
Anna-Louisa-Karsch-Straße 9
10178 Berlin
Telefon: +49 30 24 78 16 36
Fax: +49 30 24 78 16 37
E-Mail: info@galleria9-berlin.com
Criterion for
Selection of Works
All images presuppose a system of graphical
projection. In some images, this system itself is either a central visual theme
of the work, or a sine qua non for
the conveyance of the work's central ideas. Each work in this show pertains to
at least one of these two categories.
Room 1
Pablo Alonso
At first glance, the image of folded fabric in Pilgrim Elite (2010) recalls the drapery
of Zurbarán, but in fact the disturbing inconsistency of their chiaroscuro
relations reveal multiple competing perspectives that are impossible in reality
and entirely contrived by the artist. The square format, an emblem of Modernist
self-referentiality because it has no vertical or horizontal, here becomes a
diamond that imposes a vertical and horizontal that further ensures a sense of
orthogonal depth in the relation between the central and external fields.
Heiner Franzen
Because of the scale variation, and due the
conditioning of our perception to associate the bigger of two images with a
foreground, and the smaller with a middle or background, Heiner Franzen's pair
of drawings evoke a sense of looking simultaneously at the same image at
different distances mediated by a space external to the frame. But closer
scrutiny reveals that these images are in fact different in ways that truncated
lines in one seem to be completed in the other. This effect generates a spatial
tension between the drawings in which the background and foreground appear to
exchange places in continuous but irregular oscillation.
Emanuele Becheri
In fixing real webs to adhesive paper, Becheri's Ragnatelle (Spider Webs) destroy the
regular patterns of real webs, a projection system that nature has devised in
order to evade the perception of the spider's prey. By means of this
destruction, the artist generates a series of accidental patterns that evoke
the contrived perspective relations of painterly abstraction.
Adrian Lohmüller
These works reinterpret a projection system virtually
unknown to the Western world, which the artist encountered during this period
in the Marshall Islands of the South Pacific. At first, Western visitors could
not imagine how the islanders, for centuries, had managed safely to navigate
vast ocean distances to reach tiny islands where a miscalculation would have
resulted in certain death. But they had devised a projection system to map the
subtle changes in wave patterns that became as readable thereby as paths on
land.
Room 2
Joep van Liefland
By making an image of a flattened VHS tape box, the
artist destroys our 3D perception of the source object and replaces it with
abstract perspective relations that compete with the linear logo design printed
on the product. Implicit in the image are the absent perspectives of the
digitized images the box formerly contained.
Jia
This photo from the artist's Road Series is shot at night from inside a speeding car during a
heavy rain. These conditions are selected in order to frustrate the apparatus
of an automatic digital camera by confounding its capacity to generate a
consistent sense of perspectival depth, so that the resulting image is so
distorted that its source is unrecognizable. This departure from a literal
imitation of reality is consistent with ideas implicit in traditional Chinese
landscape that uses empty volumes of mist in order to obscure transitions
between each of three distinct projection systems for foreground, middle, and
background.
Oliver Laric
Holographic stickers used for consumer product
authenticity verification ironically generate a false 3D perspective on a flat
surface. But the regularity of their
juxtaposition in Laric's piece compounds this attribute with dynamic effect.
Gregor Schneider
This photo is of a room in Schneider's ongoing project
Haus U R, in which the raw material
of the work is a house that the artist alters. By definition, a house is one of
the most fundamental of all necessarily functional constructions. But the
artist's intervention not only confounds the functionality of the structure,
but spatial perception of its formal aspect as well. This photo appears to be
that of a conventional room, but in fact it is a room that the artist has built
within an existing room of the house. In almost any building, our perception of
interior perspective is conditioned by assumptions about the supposed relation
between an interior space, the exterior walls, and the exterior itself. By
fundamentally altering this relation, the artist not only defies the house's
functional design aspect, he generates a new perspective contrived by the
artist.
Ai Weiwei
The suitcase is part of a series the artist devised
for his project for Documenta XII in 2007: Fairytale,
in which he brought 1001 Chinese nationals to Kassel. The piece therefore
evokes conceptual perspectives of discourses of emigration, foreign integration
with Western Europe, displacement, and the problem of national identity in the
face of domestic and international tension. Formally, the work juxtaposes a
flat abstract projection of empty white volumes that disrupt the intrinsic
perspectival dimensionality of a real object.
Room 3
Renata Kaminska
The artist's video of the Tegel Airport control tower
and terminal is a subject whose layers of historical and contemporary political
discourses become similarly layered by integrating several perspective
variations into the same video image. By shooting into a mirror that in turn
reflects images from other mirrors, the artist renders visible this
simultaneity of projected depths and aspect ratios entirely without digital
post production effects.
Michael Kunze
The body of Kunze's work reveals a range of innovations
in the use of multiple perspectives, integrating thereby the perspectival
advances of abstraction with the figurative image. This painting, revisited by
the artist periodically between 2007 and 2012, multiplies the effect by
depicting other paintings that in in turn generate further tensions of
perspective not only in their image content, but also by the deployment of
their borders.
Philipp
Lachenmann
The artist's photo, Nature Morte 2012-?, uses perspective to treat the subject of his
own mortality after narrowly escaping death by illness this year. The three
elements of the piece become a metonym for all immanent reality: animal,
vegetable, and mineral; but each is related to mortality since the travertine
stone is associated with tombs, the leaf has fallen, and the skull is centered
in the work. But each element poses its own projection system each in tension
with the other. The stone evokes the multiple artificial perspectives of
"all over" composition of postwar abstraction. The spiral decay
pattern of the leaf asserts a single-point perspective even on an varied
surface, and the skull retains the dimensionality of the chiaroscuro rendering
of old master works of which it is a stock image.
Sarah Lüdemann
This corner object generates an illusion of 3D
perspective by the conjunction of opposed mirrors and two flat images that
become an integral whole only in the viewer's perception. In this way, the
piece asserts the perceptive faculty not only as a passive element, but as a
constitutor of perspective illusion. here, the image constituted thereby is a
metonym of a critical discourse of false conventions of gender association.
Meghan Tomeo
Watercolor here becomes the medium to evoke a wet
subject that embodies the faculty of the perception of perspective: a pair of
eyes—since the perception of depth presupposes stereoscopic vision. Here, the
artists evokes an attempt to focus on the tiny particles on the surface of the
retina in order to suggest internalized perspectives prior to interaction with
the outside world.