MORE LIGHT

TOM BURR, CLAIRE FONTAINE, SERGEJ JENSEN, KITTY KRAUS, MANFRED PERNICE, ANDREAS SLOMINSKI, COSIMA VON BONIN & CERITH WYN EVANS. CURATED BY ALEXANDER SCHRÖDER & THILO WERMKE

 

November / December 2012

The exhibition More Light curated by Alexander Schröder and Thilo Wermke shows works by Tom Burr, Claire Fontaine, Sergej Jensen, Kitty Kraus, Manfred Pernice, Andreas Slominski, Cosima von Bonin, and Cerith Wyn Evans.

More Light takes its title from a light installation by Cerith Wyn Evans, whose work draws back on a conceptual heritage while also citing from the collective memory. For example his collages taken from pages of the book “portraits of Greatness” by Yosuf Karsh, he uses historical as well as collective imagery. The collages are a series of black and white celebrity portraits, each combined with a biographical text on the back side incoherent with the portrait on the front.

The collective Claire Fontaine addresses the economic crisis as well as neoliberalism’s understanding of the individual. The work If you see something, say something, (Bob the Sponge) is made of a black Eastpack backpack with safety pins, buttons and patches attached on it. This work adapts a typical teenage everyday life relict. Here Claire Fontaine takes elements from the political sphere as well as popular culture and turns them into a metaphor for our post-Fordist society.

Both, Tom Burr’s installations as well as Kitty Kraus’ sculptural works take a fresh look on minimalism and constructivism. While Tom Burr starts out from an intense examination of minimalist practices, works like Splendid Isolation approach the critical and political implications of art. Kitty Kraus’ works show a great fragility in their presence while employing strong materials, they examine the legacies of constructivism by exploring space and motion.

Manfred Pernice and Andreas Slominski on the other hand question the possibilities of sculpture as a historical medium, each with a different approach. Where Manfred Pernice’s sculptures take advantage of used materials to create relationships between spaces, Andreas Slominski’s approach broadens the understanding of its medium in a humorous way.

Working within the idiom of minimalist painting, Sergej Jensen’s practice draws attention to the materiality of painting while at the same time taking a very personal approach.

Cosima von Bonin also spans a field of social, popular and cultural references, where her conceptual works challenge the borders between art and everyday life.