JÜRGEN TELLER. GET A LIFE.

courtesy Jürgen Teller

I just rediscovered this in my bookshelf: Jürgen Teller's awesome photos for Vivienne Westwoods Spring / Summer 2010 collection 'Get a Life'. The models are Ms. Westwood herself, her husband Andreas Kronthaler, fashion model Tati Cotliar and Pamela Anderson.

AMY'S LONDON: LIMONCELLO, WE LOVE YOU

   

all images: Installation Views 'We Love You', Courtesy Limoncello Gallery, London

Last Wednesday saw the opening of East London gallery Limoncello’s new space in the Russian Club’s studios, Dalston. Taking a big step up (in terms of floor space if not geography) from their former shoe-box premises, directors Rebecca May Marston and Rosa Tyhurst have expanded with gusto into their bright, beautiful new space with a raucous group show – ‘We Love You’ – for which gallery artists have been invited to show one piece alongside a piece that has served as inspiration and another from a ‘hot tip’ emerging artist. Unsurprisingly, given the breadth of the Limoncello roster, the result is a pleasingly motley affair with several large sculptural work such as John Frankland’s precarious and gently comic tower of stacked pink balloons (2012) or James Torbles’ ‘Folded Concrete’ slab (2012) vying for immediate attention amongst the assembled video, photographic, painted and printed works.

Although a sense that the show was crowded doubtless owed much to the spectacularly busy opening night where the crowds of young ‘creatives’ managed to make even the commodious premises seem claustophobic. Given space to breathe, the ‘We Love You’ concept allows for revelatory moments of clarity and coherence. Yonatan Vinitsky’s series of photographs, ‘T-R-A-P’ (2011), articulates a strong preoccupation with solid form and colours, repetition and re-configuration, echoed in the double-sided Anatal Biro composition (1950) and beautiful ‘Morgen Rot’ and ‘Abend Rot’ (2000) screenprints by Rupprecht Geiger that bookend it. Deceptively simple, Jack Strange’s levitating tower of stacked CDs  (‘Blank Maxwell’ 2012) is shimmeringly, liquidly beautiful – a magpie reminder of the over-looked glamour of the banal and quotidian.

‘We love you’ is an appropriately upbeat declaration from this East End upstart whose expanded new space is indicative of its (deservedly) growing and increasingly established status on the London art scene. And good luck to them. Limoncello, we love you too!

COLOGNE: MAX FRINTROP - RICOCHET

   

all images:  installation views, Max Frintrop, Ricochet, Courtesy: Galerie Chaplini

 'Geometry', as Isaac Newton once said, 'does not teach us to draw these lines, but requires them to be drawn.' Here we are, surrounded by geometry - the beginning of each and every brushstroke. Max Frintrop (*1982) dedicated his exhibition 'Ricochet' (= a rebound, bounce or skip off a surface) at Galerie Chaplini to these primal lines, investigating in the limits of a 2 dimensional canvas. His wooden sculpture, growing into- and out of the walls and the ceiling, appears as an extension of the colourful paintings. The surface is penetrated. Two- and three dimensionality shake hands and create a space within the space, hypnotising us with their undoubtful, logical truth. Beauty without frills. Conceptuality without severity. The lines are drawn, geometry is born.

FRIEDRICH KUNATH

     

From top: Friedrich Kunath, "The Inside Of The Outside Of A Dream", 2012, "The Years We Had Were Not All Bad (Free Agents)", 2011/12, "Almost Summer", 2012; Courtesy: all images BQ, Berlin, Photo: Roman Maerz, Berlin

'Come back romance, all is forgiven' neon-coloured letters welcome the visitors of BQ's stunningly well smelling gallery space. Friedrich Kunath's created a world, somewhere between kitsch and sarcasm. His current show 'Things we did when we were dead' approaches death, failure or melancholia with an enviable effortlessness. Kunath (*1974, Germany), who is also a represented artist at White Cube in London, avoids the surrealism-trap by showing more self-irony than anything else. His paintings are always on the fringes of a failed masterpiece-copy, but their layers continuously confuse, somehow and truly unexplainable develop into something beautiful, dragging the attention to incoherent details - bananas, clowns, American advertise illustrations, Brothers Grimm drawings, Pinocchio with tits. Romance, in Kunath's painterly world, is transformed into a compost of old memories and tightens up in his pathetic self-portrait The Inside Of The Outside Of A Dream. Kunath reanimated Romance. It returned, but this time it gives us the finger.

COLOGNE: DAVID OSTROWSKI 'DANN LIEBER NEIN'

  

photos by artfridge

David Ostrowski's show "Dann lieber nein" ( Then rather no) at Figge von Rosen Gallery included his recent series of works, such as 'F'. For this, David has been provoking mistakes and painterly failures in order to evoke dynamic compositions. His canvases characteristically carry blue spray paint indicating childish comic drawings and simplified body parts, such as feet, penises or breasts. But also glitter-sticky-tape, wood and paper pieces are glued on top of his works, endowing them a more voluminous and massive visual appearance. 

DANN LIEBER NEIN
until the 16th of June

GALERIE FIGGE VON ROSEN, COLOGNE
Aachener Straße 65
50674 Cologne
Opening Hours: Tuesday-Friday, 11-18h, Saturday 12-17h

david-ostrowski.com

INTERVIEW: ULRICH VOGL

Once upon a time, Ulrich Vogl wanted to become a diplomat, because the southern German installation artist loves to travel and to meet new people. His poetic artworks catalyze dreams. Employing light, shadows, mirrors and seemingly banal objects, they transform and manipulate rooms, introducing a re-thought handling of space - creating an illusionary dreamscape. Without disregarding carefulness and attention to details, Ulrich is curious and does not avoid coincidences in his working process. Openly and extremely warm-hearted, the Berlin-based artist recently shared work formations, stories of his everyday-life and his past with me. At his studio in the middle of Kreuzberg, artfridge was allowed to get a sneak preview of Ulrich’s newest works.

INTERVIEW: SANTIAGO YDANEZ

Supersized canvases, theatrical portraits, stuffed-out deers - thats how we know Santiago Ydanez’ art work. In his recent exhibition "Gracias por todo" in Berlin, however, he put his most funny paintings on display. The spanish artist can celebrate great success, but he is very much down to earth - and, against all my expectations, incredibly cheerful. He is all smiles and his laughter is contagious. Last week we spend an afternoon in his Berlin-based gallery Invaliden1, talking about his passion for animals, big and fast brushstrokes and existentialism. Click here or below to see the whole interview.

BERLIN: DAG ERIK ELGIN'S "ORIGINALS"

all images: Installation views, Dag Eric Elgin "Originals", courtesy Galerie Opdahl, photos by Eric Tschernow

Not just since last year's art forgery case concerning Wolfgang Beltracchi, the art world had to reveal its ignorance of assigning paintings to originals or fakes. Nevertheless, the myth of original artworks fascinates: their history, their relevance and of course their value. The Norwegian artist Dag Erik Elgin (*1962) immersed himself in the virtuous craft of his favourite masters and learned copying them. Cézanne's skulls, Malevich's minimalist forms, something that could be a Braque or a Picasso  - six paintings at Galerie Opdahl in Berlin create the illusion of originality, underlined by original (and extremely pricy) frames. Elgin collects frames since years: similar to his painterly method, he investigates in their history, their provenience.

The opposite gallery-wall reflects the six works in dark paint, just as in the style of Kazimir Malevich's suprematistic black square. Egin seems to accept Malevich's manifesto "From Cubism to Suprematism" at face value, when transferring it into a visual concept of his own in the gallery space. Anyway, "Originals" turns out to be a very personal exhibition: two of the paintings are not copies, but Elgin's own continuation of cubist aesthetic. 

BERLIN: "YOU KILLED ME FIRST" AT KW

   

film stills from top: 1+2 Richard Kern and Nick Zedd "The Manhattan Love Suicides: Thrust In Me", 1985; David Wojnarowicz and Phil Zwickler "Fear of Disclosure: Psycho-Social Implications of HIV Revelation", 1989; Richard Kern "Fingered", 1986; Richard Kern "X is Y", 1990; courtesy the artists

It felt like entering Berghain, or some other Techno Club, when I walked through the first hallway at KW's current exhibition "You killed me first". Black light, darkness, loud music. Kunstwerke - Institute for Contemporary Art dedicates a large show, staged on four floors only containing short films, to the Cinema of Transgression - an avantgardistic, low-budget and New York-based art movement from the 1980s and early 1990s. "Any film that doesn't shock isn't worth looking at", their manifesto claims and continues, "all values must be challenged, nothing is sacred." Nick Zedd, Richard Kern, David Wojnarowicz and the other members certainly did not respect borders and much less anything that could be sacred. Rather the opposite: Rock' n' Roll, sex, suicide, rage, rape, drugs - this show is hardcore in every sense. No surprise that it only welcomes visitors over 18 years.

AMY'S LONDON: MEANS WITHOUT ENDS

   

from top: Daniel Sturgis 'The Social Question', Ian Davenport 'Puddle Painting (Yellow Lime Green Study)', Mark Francis 'Duality', installation view (sculpture to the right by DJ Simpson 'Isovist')

In a small but elegant gallery space, in a small but elegant courtyard behind Regent’s Street is a exhibition which demonstrates, in an equally restrained way, why abstract painting – after the clamour of Pollock and the silence of Minimalism - still has big things to say. Means Without Ends (at Pippy Houldsworth Gallery until February 18th) brings together four contemporary painters, Mark Francis, Ian Davenport, DJ Simpson and Daniel Sturgis, all working within the archetypal abstract tradition which privileges line – as both form and gesture – as the expression of a vital dynamism.

COLOGNE: "BEFORE THE LAW" AT MUSEUM LUDWIG

  

from top: Pawel Althamer, Bródno People © Pawel Althamer, Courtesy Sammlung Goetz; Paul Chan, Sade for Sade's sake © Courtesy of the artist and Greene Naftali; Marko Lehanka, Ohne Titel (Bauerndenkmal) © Marko Lehanka; Thomas Schütte, Vater Staat © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2011, Zoe Leonard, Tree © Zoe Leonard

"Before the Law" ("Vor dem Gesetz"), a title borrowed from the infamous short story by Franz Kafka, is an astonishing exhibition at Museum Ludwig, showing sculptural post-war works. Contemporary and older artists, such as Bruce Nauman, Pawel Althammer, Alberto Giacometti, Joseph Beuys and Paul Chan, are assembled to discuss the individual's role, its dignity and its power in relation to the state. "Vater Staat" by Thomas Schütte and "
untitled: staircase" by Phyllida Barlow visualize the state's and system's giantness - its force - with monumental sculptures. Other works, as for instance the untitled farmers' monument by Marko Lehanka deal with rituals, intoxicating riots or possible revolutions. An outstanding piece is the silent, several-hours-long video projection "Sade for Sade's sake" by Paul Chan. It exposes a naked and trembling society that seems to be located in a frightening dystopian time: everybody is fornicating each other, crawling on the floor, pulling and pushing each other. Humankind is transformed into an anarchistic group of animals, simply following their instincts. The piece is hypnotizing and disturbing - a nightmarish end (or a possible restart) of our society, reminding of the sentence "human dignity is inviolable".

DANIEL RAPLEY: COVENANT

For the last 18 months the british artist Daniel Rapley has been really diligent - or should I say "obsessed": he has been busy writing down the complete King James Bible on ruled paper with a ballpoint pen. 3.116.480 characters - 66 books. He made a deal with himself - a covenant - to finish the book and then show it in a staple. Therefore, his work is about trust: As a viewer, one doesn't know whether the whole staple is filled out, or whether it is only the top page. In times where guys like David Hockney criticize Damien Hirst's factory-like work production, it is a very interesting contrast to see the conventions of artistic labour. The show opens on Thursday, the 26th of January from 6-8pm.