Cay Bahnmiller @ Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin

Cay Bahnmiller

Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin

February 17 – April 15, 2023

CAY BAHNMILLER (b. 1955; d. 2007, Detroit, USA) was born in Wayne, Michigan. After spending part of her childhood in Argentina and Germany, Cay Bahnmiller lived and worked in Detroit until her death.

Cay Bahnmiller’s art is marked by accumulation: of paint, found objects, texts, memories and even of time. Layered and sedimented, Cay Bahnmiller collapsed temporality, allowing her work to reflect the profusion of experience – in all its facets – that can only be accumulated through life lived. She worked fluidly across mediums. Making no distinction between surfaces, she built compositions on street signs, books, pages torn from magazines and auction catalogs, found pieces of wood and toys. This openness was offset by her rigorous examination of her approach and subject matter. There is a clarity and intensity of vision that reveals how purposefully and carefully Cay Bahnmiller crafted her dense work. She related occurrence through both abstract language and exacting detail.

Making the evolving and eroding landscape of Detroit a crucial focus of her work, she connected her own existence with the conditions of the city. Beyond this, her work would ultimately touch a vast range of themes, from poetry, literature and art history, to class and social stratification, politics, trauma, and death. After being violently assaulted in 1993, Cay Bahnmiller’s work became more insular, and her lifelong preoccupation with urban space was accented by a more conflicted relationship between public and private. Her own memory was a key element in her working method. Often calling back to her time abroad, she allowed her childhood experiences to commingle with the literature she favored and her everyday life in the city. “My perception in painting is enhanced by executing this work in the archeological ruin of Detroit,” she wrote, “a city steeped in sedimentation of light… The stark absence of an ‘outer’ world necessitates the imaging of an interior.” Cay Bahnmiller collected cast-off bits of her city – allowing them to convey the character of the place and play roles in her own narratives – building up sculptures that are almost camouflaged.

A contradictory thread runs through both Cay Bahnmiller's life and her art. Her struggle to reconcile the conflicting sides of her personality was something she grappled with until her death. She desired greater recognition as an artist and yet sabotaged her own career repeatedly. Cay Bahnmiller shut down a solo show for herself on the opening day. Works were often made, unmade and made again, showing traces of each stage and the desire to revise and rework. Many of her works arrived at a near-monochrome all over, covering all that was once there of text, figuration and reference. Visceral, unstable and painful, their immediacy is tangible. “In my search for form, the final construction and process often results from negation,” she wrote. True to her belief that “painting is inscription, rather than description,” she used the world of art and its vicissitude – taste, decor, culture, speculation, history – as the literal base of her work, building up layered, totemic, works on magazine pages, auction catalogues, restaurant stationary, and books by her favorite authors. These works also testify to her being a reader and writer as much as an artist.

Cay Bahnmiller is represented in the collections of the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the University of Michigan Museum of Art. Her work has been written about in Artforum and The New York Times, among other periodicals. A multi-part chronicle of Clay Bahnmiller’s life and work was written by the artist Cary Loren for Three Fold Press in 2021. Since her death, solo shows have been organized at What Pipeline, Detroit and White Columns, New York. This is the first solo exhibition of her work to be held in Europe.

This exhibition was realized in collaboration with the Estate of Cay Bahnmiller and What Pipeline, Detroit.

GALERIE BARBARA WEISS

Kohlfurter Strasse 41/43, 10999 Berlin 

www.galeriebarbaraweiss.de

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Peter Fend @ Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin - Birds Reign

Peter Fend: Birds Reign

Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin

November 21, 2020 – January 23, 2021

Galerie Barbara Weiss presents „BIRDS REIGN“, the second solo exhibition at the gallery by PETER FEND.

At the center of the exhibition is the installation Urban Extrusion, which was first shown in the context of „Wonderful: Visions of the Near Future“ at the Arnolfini, Bristol, UK in 2004. In an experimental approach, Urban Extrusion pursues the practical and ecological potential of transforming urban waste into artificial feathers, which can rehabilitate ecosystems when they are scattered back into nature. Fend hypothesizes that feathers can be generated out of waste via the help of yeasts and other organisms, creating keratin, the main component of any feather. The newly derived keratin can then be further processed to form artificial feathers. And in turn, these could be dispersed into lakes, rivers and wetlands, where they would be taken up by ducks, swans and migrating birds. The importance of waterways in sustaining life is one of Peter Fend’s longest standing areas of research. These regions are elemental to ecosystems that stretch far beyond the banks of rivers or shores of oceans, and Fend treats these sites as a possible origin point for targeted rejuvenation. Searching for ways out of our ecological impasse, Fend’s proposal aims to solve two environmental issues at once — taking an excess from one environment and transforming it into something useful for one that is lacking.

The show’s title: „BIRDS REIGN“ refers not only to the capacity for birds (and their feathers) to positively effect large and complex networks of life, but also their disregard for human-derived hierarchies and dominions. Accompanying the installation Urban Extrusion are new drawings by Peter Fend that depict the flyways of migratory birds. Like a global circulatory system, these trajectories cross vast bodies of water, borders and hemispheres. In depicting such large swaths of the world, Fend implicitly includes sites of international conflict and areas where ecosystems have been ruined by human activity. In ever-widening space, notions of nationality and ideology collapse under the effort of the journey. Peter Fend asks how things might improve for the world at large if humanity began taking its cues from the birds.

For more than 40 years, Peter Fend has expanded the boundaries of how an artistic practice can relate to society and, moreover, to the world that society inhabits. His unique methodology incorporates architecture, art history, activism, and business acumen to propose ecologically responsible solutions to real world problems. Through his work across mediums, Peter Fend aims to spark discussion amongst policy-makers, corporations and individuals in a manner that transgresses the context of art. His efforts as founder of OCEAN EARTH pioneered new methods of engaging the public through artistic action. The group employed aesthetic and art-derived strategies for analyzing civilian satellite data, uncovering geopolitical events with global ramifications, making its findings accessible to an audience of millions via major news outlets.

PETER FEND (b. 1950) has been featured in notable survey exhibitions around the world, including: Documenta IX, 1992, Kassel; the 45th Venice Biennial, 1999 and the 47th Venice Biennial, 2003; the Liverpool Biennial, 2003; and the 8th Sharjah Biennial, 2007. He has had solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Dusseldorf; The Kitchen, New York; Kunstraum Daxer, Munich; American Fine Art, New York; Arnolfini, Bristol; Roger Pailhas, Paris; Georg Kargl, Vienna; and Essex Street, New York.

A newly commissioned project by Peter Fend is included in Manifesta 13, Marseille, which is on view until the end of November. A series of works that were recently acquired by the Migros Museum, Zurich are currently featured in a survey exhibition there on the topic of ‘potential worlds’.

GALERIE BARBARA WEISS

Kohlfurter Strasse 41/43, 10999 Berlin

galeriebarbaraweiss.de

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Friederike Feldmann @ Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin

Friederike Feldmann: Printemps 2020
Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin
March 14 – April 18, 2020

Galerie Barbara Weiss presents a solo exhibition with new works by Friederike Feldmann. The title Printemps 2020 cites fashion, but it is not as a metaphor of the ephemeral that fashion figures in this exhibition. Rather fashion figures as a language with its own syntax and lexis. In detailed studies, Friederike Feldmann compares the constitutive elements of drawing—form, color, line, shape—with the rhetorics of fashion, its codes, patterns and processes. It is an analogy by means of which the artists invites the viewer to reflect on the structuality of her medium, a reflection that opens onto questions of temporality, materiality and plasticity: Is there something like a rhetoric of drawing, comparable to the language of fashion?

In Collection, 2020, Friederike Feldmann explores the margins of her medium. The works only show the outer edges of drawings, which appear to lie on top of each other like sheets of paper spread out on the wall. This effect, which may be read as a reference to the prominence of illusionism in the history of mural painting, is achieved through a shading of the sheets’ edges, resulting in an impression of stratification. Phenomenologically, the artist relies on another illusionist device to interrogate the threshold where passive perception merges with active projection, where reconstruction turns into construction. For just as the eye only reads the first letters of a word to compose a signifying unit, Friederike Feldmann zeros in on the margins of drawings to interrogate a mechanism of perception that resembles an art historical form of pattern recognition. Yet the works are situated on the medium’s margin in a broader sense as well, insofar as Friederike Feldmann not only includes artistic idioms in her collection. She covers a disparate spectrum: the gestural stands besides the geometrical; the architect’s drawing next to the doodle. What appears in this comparison, however, is not a confrontation of high and low, but rather something like an artistic and playful exploration of drawing as a cultural praxis.

If the mural painting interrogates the characteristics that allow for the recognition of different languages of drawing, the smaller drawings shift the focus to specific Looks, 2017 - 2020. They explore those features that individuate a personal style. All of these works—traces and documentations of very personal encounters—emerged from the engagement with portrait drawings of selected artists. With their strict economy of means, the drawings reduce a personal style to its essence while simultaneously translating it. Beyond citation and appropriation, the artists familiarizes herself with a selected body of work, in order to distill and translate its style, working not with a specific model, but solely on the basis of this practiced proximity. Deliberately, Friederike Feldmann’s translation of highly personal styles into her own artistic idiom moves between difference and repetition to pose a fundamental question about what constitutes style, influence and translation in art. 

GALERIE BARABARA WEISS
Kohlfurter Strasse 41/43 - 10999 Berlin
galeriebarbaraweiss.de

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