In between

Participating artists: Mary Bauermeister, Clément Borderie, Jaan Elken, Roni Feldman, Daniel Hourdé, Pascual Jordan, Friedrich Lippe, Salomé, Erling Victor, Ingeborg zu Schleswig-Holstein, Rudolf zur Lippe

Duration: 22.06.-29.07.2012

Curator: Pascual Jordan

Werkstattgalerie is exhibiting young and established positions of modern and contemporary art and presents new aspects in painting, drawing, photography and sculpture. Main emphasis is lying in abstract arts and innovative technically new developments in traditional arts.

In its exhibition praxis the gallery doesn’t follow a strict concept to show the richness of contemporary art which shows the changes and topics of our time. This has been done by curating international group exhibitions through open calls for a specific topic or presenting common new developments among young artists within a certain country.

Werkstattgalerie has been opened in June 2007 and is run by Pascual Jordan and Mirko Freiwald

Werkstattgalerie Berlin is presenting at KCCC under the title “IN BETWEEN” 11 artists from Germany, Denmark, Estonia, France and America of a “New Abstraction” which opens to a New Concreteness.

The exhibition which is curated by Pascual Jordan, shows a broad art-historical arch leading from representatives of Fluxus Movement Mary Bauermeister, over the Young Wild’s such as Salomé to gesture painters like Rudolf zur Lippe and Ingeborg zu Schleswig-Holstein and young newcomers of the international art scene.

Through the phases of “abstract art” in the 20th Century, the traditional view was contrasted with a new objectivity. The anecdotal narrative in a painting was left aside. The pictures are no longer, as in the old tradition, windows to another world. There is no more illusion. This gives way to a new concreteness and openness.

Daniel Hourdé (FR)

A tour of the exhibition KCCC will begin with a work of artist Daniel Hourde’ on the walls of the staircase: the life-size cut-out figures from drawings will be transformed by the Parisian artist to a three-dimensional installation. From far his work will appear abstract; a rhythmic interplay of bright colors and grays, the bizarre, baroque-like forms will lead the viewer into the theme of the exhibition.

Roni Feldman (USA)

Viewed from the front, his works seem to be black monochrome images.

Only when viewed from the side, with change of light, they open up and present what is happening on the surface. By using airbrushed glossy varnish, he creates tension between individual and mass, abstraction and figuration.

Salomé (D)

In the composition of his paintings, he avoids the central perspective. The space is disbanded. Blue, red, yellow, green between the colours of the flesh of characters that are just barely visible as such. His style is not “painture”; he doesn’t use a differentiated colorchart, it is about hard pure colour, which he applies in powerful strokes and almost flat onto the canvas. In the water lily paintings Salome’ is approaching the abstraction.

Jaan Elken (EE)

In the second half of the 1990s he abandoned the realistic style of his early works and turned to a highly expressive abstract style. The iconography of his paintings is finely tuned. It is reminiscent to the new media of mass culture, which is why his style has been also been described as “abstract graffiti”. The new graffiti motifs imported verbal associations in the paintings. The art critic Harry Liivrand has described Elken as “the Estonian Anselm Kiefer”. Elken has combined with his unique and intuitive language of painting the local mythology and gossip with the colours and symbols of the communist past to the international social consciousness.

Friedrich Lippe (D)

The photographer Friedrich Lippe is constantly in motion, usually at night. He is turning reality due to the movement of his camera into abstract images and creates a very unique view of his own reality.

Pascual Jordan (D)

In the works he created since 2009, he is working with opposite forces and dynamics. This is reflected both in colour and in visible motion.

Victor Erling (DK)

His monochrome works accompany the visitor through the entire exhibition. They are reflecting his thoughts on the works of other artists shown. The last in the series, a Dypthyon consisting of a white and a black screen, invites the viewer to interact with the artwork: by slightly defocusing the eyes both colours turn into a single silver tone, like the red-blue colour effect of the stained glass windows of Chartres Cathedral.

Rudolf zur Lippe (D)

The artwork of Rudolf zur Lippe is about the body gesture. The in- and exhaling, the raising and settling. A body process, an immanent, which activates the gesture of the hand but not the whole body. Rudolph zur Lippe’s gestures explore “orders of another kind,” which could “not be planned or composed and also can not be reconstructed.” His art makes vehement proposals against the supremacy of mechanical, hierarchically principles applied to the lifestyles of people, the mind and nature.

Ingeborg of Schleswig-Holstein (D)

Coincidence is important for the work of Ingeborg of Schleswig-Holstein like in her down poured paintings in which the material is organized by the force of gravity on the surface and then forms rhythmic structures. After her work with Andy Warhol, Ingeborg zu Schleswig-Holstein advanced and radicalized pioneers such as Emil Nolde and Ernst Wilhelm Nay. The result is her world of colour that continues to develop a new rigor. From their inner dynamism radiates an outward calm that draws the visitor into their revelations. Her paintings develop not in abrupt leaps, but instead evolve gradually one from the other, similar in this sense, to organic growth. In recent years, her colors have become more transparent and lucid.

Clement Boderie (FR)

His complex steel installations wrapped with canvases capture like a camera with a long-term release, the dust, leaves, pollen, rain, and human environmental impacts on the linen and are such drawing sensitive structures which make the properties of time and location of a place observable.

Mary Bauermeister (D)

Mary Bauermeister, who was a child when the war ended, grew up in an atmosphere of devastation and disillusionment that made figurative work seem irrelevant to her condition, and earlier abstract work remote from nature, which, for her, remained the only available source of wonder in a world where civilization had been largely destroyed. Many of her works therefore use concrete natural elements in order to generate abstract forms.

1960-62, she organized in her legendary studio in Cologne Lintgasse 28 experimental exhibitions, readings and concerts about “the newest music” with guests like Cage, Beuys, Christo and many others. These concerts and activities in Germany were the basis of a movement that was later called “Fluxus The works shown in this exhibition from the Constructive Tachism series made her internationally famous as a painter.