Bruno Brunnet Livres

Absence is a recurring theme in Sopie Reinhold's work: the left out, unsaid, uninvited. Basic rules of abstraction. To not give it all away. This constraint sets the tone, her underlying mood. Maybe it's a pattern. It creates a place apart from language. A very clear silence. When there are many motifs, the sense of a pattern is easily lost. Disorder stretches out. Distance helps to make sense of the overview again. Discerning the motif's repetition - affirming the pattern - satisfies some obsessive impulse and fosters a spirit of serenity ... Sophie Reinhold's paintings consistently demonstrate her astute understanding that her reality cannot be smoothed over, that the experience takes place long before it's manipulated into form. Her art emerges from a kaleidoscopic multiplicity; not following a formula, always multifaceted. One aspect of the method is salient: the decision to sand a painting, to remove and apply images, reflects an experience of reality tantamount to the wear and tear of everyday life ... The show in spring was the first to open in Berlin after restrictions due to the Covid-19 pandemic were relaxed.

In Spichtig's work a similar push and pull between attachment and repellence produces a certain form of iconicity, but one that does not ask for devotion. You recognise something about the pictures, and want to be in proximity to this something, congratulate yourself on how it resonates, bask in the cool, grunge speed of it. But the familiarity at play here stems not from likeness--to you, or your life--but from strangeness. What you recognise is not the content but the outline; if an experience, then of absence... It was actually Stichtig who told me what Marlene Dietrich said of how to keep an audience hooked: who is the one person everyone knows? The one who is not there. "Sing to them," she said. Dietrich and Spichtig practice seduction without betrayal. It is also iconicity without idealism, or even idology. Let me try another one: recollection without memory?

In the age of social media, Henning Strassburger, who studied at Kunstakademie Dusseldorf from 2006 to 2009, explores new perspectives, new approaches regarding habitus and new formal language rules. In addition to the strong charisma that pop culture quite obviously exudes on his work, one is immediately reminded of the dictum of Jasper Johns (1965) in that illusionist painting no longer needs any pictorial illusionism because it has now become an object itself; after all, the ­illusionary representation of an object, an actual object, had become obsolete with Pop Art. This is still valid today, albeit under different circumstances, which is why the exhibition organizer Max Dax is presenting the works of Henning Strassburger in the Hamburg exhibition HYPER also under the aspect that the flood of images on the Internet simulating realism provides an inexhaustible fund of object-like works in the sense of Johns. Accordingly, Henning Strassburger uses the teenage fantasies embodied by net idols as projection surfaces for abstract image motifs: the kiss of two female pop stars on the big stage just as much as the self-invention of a teen star as a tough macho-rapper.

"I must paint you! I simply must!" - this said Otto Dix to Sylvia von Harden when he ran into her on the street. "You are representative of an entire epoch!" Clearing out her closet of the heavy dresses that burdened her mother's generation and replacing them with a cigarette and a perky bob, the "New Woman" of the 1920s had become a myth of its own. The frozen iconography of that time, largely created by the media, was being challenged and explored in her many facets by the female artists and writers of the time. Until recently, many of them have been half-forgotten. Without question, the "New Woman" of the Weimar Republic didn't exist, but there were plenty of new women. Fast forward a hundred years and a lot has changed, but a lot hasn't. Amidst the all-pervasiveness of digital image phenomena, contemporary artists gathered in this brochure revisit the notions of objectivity and facticity through their distinct takes on figuration and representation. Indeed, in a time when the flâneuse is no more and the scrolleuse takes her place, as the world unfolds at our fingertips, the real and the surreal are bound to get mixed up. Artists: Jagoda Bednarski, Genesis Belanger, Ellen Berken

"Journée d'un G.I." features paintings and serigraphs from the 1960s. Ulrike Ottinger's often multi-part works, or works divided into several pictorial fields, reveal a passion for storytelling that ultimately finds its fulfillment in the medium of film. She became somewhat of a cult star in cineaste circles with her Berlin trilogy and its outstanding second film "Freak Orlando" (1981). In 2019, in the diary "Paris Calligrammes", she went on to show memories of her formative decade in Paris in a cinematic collection, which brings us right to the heart of the pictorial narratives of "Journée d'un G.I." It's the mid-1960s, Ulrike Ottinger is a painter, when Paris is shaken by images of war and revolution. At home in Nouvelle Figuration, a Parisian form of Pop Art, it is everyday scenes, comics, photography and advertising that determine the narrative style of Ottinger's images. Day-to-day rituals mingle with references to historical figures and literary heroes. While the daily battles rage, her heroes are taking a break; Che Guevara as "Le penseur" is lolling on a sofa while sipping a drink; Allen Ginsberg has "No more to say and nothing to weep for."

The facelessness of the protagonists in Josef Zekoff's paintings is one of their most distinctive features. From emblematic labyrinths - he does also paint ornaments and maps - to drawn stick figures, the in-between space occupied by these paintings encourages self-reflection, which does, however, require courage on the part of the viewer. Or as Florian Waldvogel writes in his introductory text: » Do the protagonists of his paintings seek an encounter with something that goes beyond the world of objects and fixed quantities? Is it, as Martin Heidegger writes in > What is Metaphysics? nothing dread nothing

The collection was not intended as such at the beginning. It was about engaging with and surrounding oneself with the unknown, the incomprehenible. It was about the fascination of imagination and bringing this fascination into one's own home, surrounding oneself with it, in order to remain aware of the constant stimulus of life. The collector has brought in the depths of the unconscious, of philosophy, of painting technique, and he has brought the wild and bustling Berlin into his own contemplative four walls. This collection also tells a contemporary story. It tells of a Berlin of the 90s and 00s in which so much was possible because there were large spaces for little money. The collection also tells us about backyard galleries, improvised project spaces that later became institutions and about " Club Berlin", which brought together parties with art, techno with politics.

Songs für Süd-London In seinen neuen Bildern scheint Nick Goss auf den Modus der Erinnerung abzuzielen - wie sie zu jedem Zeitpunkt zwangsläufig mehr als einen Ort und mehr als eine Logik enthält. Andererseits ist es einfach, in den Arbeiten von Nick Goss die Logik der modernistischen Collage oder des kubistischen Zwangs, Dinge auseinanderzuschneiden, zu erkennen. In seinem Bild »Last of England« ist ein Pulk von Leuten in einer an die Zeit der Weimarer Republik erinnernden Art und Weise auf der Leinwand eingekeilt, als sehe man sie in einem zersprungenen Spiegel - eine Tasche, ein Schal, etwas unter dem Arm Getragenes sind alles Teile auf derselben planen Ebene. Betrachtet man sie länger, ist der Effekt nicht wie bei Höchs surrealen Assemblagen oder Kirchners spröden Straßenlandschaften derjenige der Verfremdung oder Desorientierung. Ich sehe die Menschen in den neuen Bildern von Nick Goss eher als Fremde, an die jemand still glaubt, die mit Würde ausgestattet sind. Die Fragmentierung in diesen Werken ließe sich somit besser als eine Art von Sampling verstehen, wie in der Musik. In dieser Distanzierung steckt Humor, wie auch in Goss' Bildern, und hinter dem, was wir sehen, liegt viel mehr verborgen, wie flach oder vergammelt oder vergeblich es auch erscheinen mag. Es hat Spaß gemacht in der Bowling Alley, bis es halt keinen mehr gemacht hat … oder etwa nicht? Ausstellung: CFA Contemporary Fine Arts Berlin; 4/9 - 16/10/2021