Ryan Mrozowski @ Galerie Nordenhake Berlin - "Space Echo" Exhibition

Ryan Mrozowski: Space Echo

Galerie Nordenhake Berlin

March 1 - April 26, 2025

With the title of his third exhibition at Galerie Nordenhake Berlin, Ryan Mrozowski is referring to the Roland Space Echo, a tape-based effect machine introduced in 1974 designed to create echo and delay effects. A magnetic tape moves in an endless loop over a recording head and several playback heads, causing the signal to be reproduced multiple times with slight delays. Part of the resulting echo is recorded and reproduced again, creating a feedback loop—a self-reinforcing cycle with subtle, unpredictable variations in the sound.

Ryan Mrozowski follows a similar movement of repetition and variation with his Split Paintings. They depict the very same floral motif in opulent, contrasting colors. In each part of the works, usually constructed as diptychs or polyptychs, he omits areas he elaborates in the other parts of the multi-panel work. Only the combination of the different canvases creates a complete motif. Some paintings initially look like abstract patterns, making it difficult to discern the original floral subject. Colors flicker and blur. The motif disintegrates due to the empty, monochrome fields in the paintings, while simultaneously being completed by the other parts of the works. Like an echo, we try to return to an origin that, however, is no longer there. The deviations inevitably resulting from the painterly repetition have rendered it unrecognizable. The rough canvas shines through in several parts of the works. Its coarse, grainy structure and the visible, small flaws in the weaving of the fabric are reminiscent of the organic noise of analog tape-recordings, and emphasize the physical production process of the paintings.

Mrozowski’s works move effortlessly between rigid form and its dissolution. His disintegration of the motif reaches a quiet climax in the only work that consists of just one canvas, a “puzzle painting” made of raw canvas, which indeed stood at the beginning of Mrozowski's process of painterly repetition. In the work, the floral motif results from the arrangement of individual pieces of wood covered with untreated canvas and fitted into a picture frame with clear gaps and voids. This monochrome arrangement finds a distant and vibrant echo in the bright reds, lush greens, and radiant blues of the other paintings in the exhibition.

Mrozowski’s work does not necessarily refer to a reality outside of itself, it rather creates a self-referential system. His paintings disrupt our automatic mode of perception. It was ultimately the distortion of sounds, not their realistic reproduction, which proofed decisive for the success of the Roland Space Echo. The effort to find a logic in Mrozowski’s repetition, deconstruction, and defamiliarization of an ubiquitous, almost banal motif eventually leads to the search for a visual rhythm. Together, the images create a dynamic movement of the gaze and an ever-changing and overlapping composition.

Ryan Mrozowski, born in Indiana, PA in 1981, currently lives and works between Hudson and Brooklyn, NY. He received his MFA from the Pratt Institute, NY in 2005, and his BFA from the Indiana University of Pennsylvania in 2003. 

Ryan Mrozowski has had numerous solo exhibitions in galleries internationally, recently at i8 Gallery, Reykjavik (2022), Ratio 3, San Francisco (2021), Chapter New York (2019), Simon Lee Gallery, London (2018), Hannah Hoffman Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2018), Arcade, London, UK (2016) and Pierogi, Brooklyn, NY (2012 and 2010). His work was on view in group exhibitions at Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo, México-City (2020), the Pratt Institute, New York (2017), Art in General, Vilnius (2014), Practice Gallery, Philadelphia, PA (2013), Kansas University Art & Design Gallery, Lawrence, KS (2012) and The Kitchen, New York (2011). This is his sixth solo exhibition at Galerie Nordenhake.

GALERIE NORDENHAKE BERLIN

Lindenstrasse 34, 10969 Berlin

nordenhake.com

Christian Andersson @ Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin

Christian Andersson
"Put the Cobwebs Back in Place"
Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin
Through July 30th, 2016

In his exhibition Put the Cobwebs Back in Place, CHRISTIAN ANDERSSON works unfold a complex network of metaphysical speculations exploring and questioning our seemingly given reality. His multimedia works draw references from diverse fields such as science and science fiction, the history of art and popular culture as well as the canon of western civilisation. His practice is deeply rooted in the legacy of surrealism and a firm trust in a mysterious, hidden aspect of life.

In the first room we are confronted with skilfully crafted wooden objects of a complex nature. For the funnel-shaped objects titled Now Wait for Last Year Christian Andersson worked with a woodturner to excavate the annual rings of 120-year old oak trees. Cutting progressively deeper from the bark to the trunk’s core and vice versa, every single annual ring is being revealed. Due to this process the rings become stretched in their width.

The presentation of the objects on a functional steel shelving system is reminiscent of how artefacts would be tucked away in a museum’s storage or how materials and tools are stored in a workshop. They remain oscillating between measuring tools or precious artefacts from the past. Smaller than table size these objects might also be seen as models of four-dimensional space-time curved by the presence of matter, for example a black hole, as described in the General Theory of Relativity. The work evokes the tradition of the Bicycle Wheel by the great doubter Marcel Duchamp. Not merely a ready made, it was an object of pseudoscientific speculation aiming at visualising the invisible fourth dimension (that —before Einstein—was conceived of as a dimension of space).

The installation Chroma Key Twine has a similar character as a model of thought. Conceptualising time and history as constructs subjected to mediation and debate, a green background paper woven into a grid and supported by two tripods fills the entire visual field of the viewer. The green screen, or chroma key technique is commonly used in film and TV productions to digitally insert virtual backgrounds, merging two images together. A powerful metaphor for our progressively dematerialised, mediated world the work offers an open space for projecting alternative, and in this case parallel, future realities.

In his installation One Day, which is on view behind a curtain in the back room, Christian Andersson gives us a glimpse of the deep personal shock that might be caused by the realisation of the fallibility of established truths about our reality. The installation uses light―an even with current knowledge still not fully explicable phenomena―as medium. Six gobo-lights, casually stored in a crate, seem to live a life of their own, projecting faint light in the shape of texts onto the ceiling and walls of the gallery. The words form the story of a macabre joke or a science-fiction nightmare.

From here the exhibition’s choreography leads back into the first room. Gazing (back) through the bronze-tinted curtain, the front room now appears distant, dreamlike and somewhat unfamiliar.

CHRISTIAN ANDERSSON, born 1973 in Stockholm, currently lives and works in Malmö.

He recently had solo exhibitions at the Kunstmuseum Thun in 2015, as well as the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, and Moderna Museet, Malmö (both 2011). Lately, his work has been on view in group exhibitions at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg (2016), Medizinhistorisches Museum, Berlin (2015), Magazin 4, Bregenz (2014), Matadero, Madrid and the 12th Biennale de Lyon (both 2013). Later this year, his works will be on view in group shows at the Boimans van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam and the Living Art Museum in Reykjavik. He is currently working on an exhibition project in Le Havre curated by Marc-Olivier Wahler and a solo exhibition at CIAJG, Guimaraes in 2017. Put the Cobwebs Back in Place is his fifth exhibition with Galerie Nordenhake.

NORDENHAKE, Berlin & Stockholm
www.nordenhake.com

Christian Andersson at Galerie Nordenhake Berlin

Christian Andersson, 51 days in June
Galerie Nordenhake Berlin
June 11 - August 1, 2010

Galerie Nordenhake presents its second solo exhibition in Berlin with Swedish artist Christian Andersson. Using elements from the past as an anchor for his present production, Andersson explores questions of temporality, perception, visibility and representation. 

Upon entering the gallery, a slight and seemingly misplaced scent is detecrigged to an iron rod with copper wire. The contraption replicates what some believe to be an early electrochemical cell found in Baghdad, dating from the first centuries table. In Paper Clip (The Baghdad Batteries), 49 clay pots are filled with vinegar and A.D. (substantially earlier than Volta’s documented invention around 1800). The combination of copper and iron with the vinegar’s slight acidity produces an electrical magnet, a positive charge manifest only in the paperclip clinging to the top of the contraption’s iron rod.

In The Sistine Chapel (B.C.), the corner of a glass table is broken off and rearranged as a method of display, presenting a torqued comic strip that can only be read in the reflection on the table’s surface. In the short scene, two cavemen puzzlingly liken clouds to the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling. Temporal conflation and prehistory also play a role in a nearby photograph of colored flames burning like Molotov cocktails from chemistry bottles. In Untitled (Fire), a once indecipherable wonder has been translated into the familiar language of representation: the RGB color spectrum of electronic displays on televisions and computers. In his image, Andersson evokes ancient discoveries and modern man’s psychological and technical evolution, including color theory and color photography, a mode of representation that nears our perception of reality more effectively than its predecessors. 

Opposite the gallery’s main entrance hangs an image depicting a black and white photograph framed in slightly damaged glass. The photograph shows a wrapped sculpture suspended in the air, apparently mid-installation. Beneath the blankets and ropes, invisible to the viewer’s eye, is Georg Kolbe’s Alba (Morgen or Dawn), a bronze sculpture that was included in Mies van der Rohe’s German Pavilion for the 1929 International Exposition in Barcelona. The Pavilion, erected as a reception hall for the grand opening and a transitory passage for visitors to the fair, was lavishly constructed from onyx, travertine, glass and a variety of marble. Although it was dismantled shortly after the close of the exhibition, the influential building was reconstructed in the mid-1980s in its original location, along with a replica of Kolbe’s sculpture. In Andersson’s image, the hairline crack in the glass and the futile effort to conceal it with a second layer visualize unforeseen difficulties, an idea gone wrong. The hovering and unidentifiable creation of a German sculptor working in the ‘30s marks a moment of limbo and underscores the temporal lag between the original Pavilion and its subsequent restaging. 

The Barcelona Pavilion returns in the second gallery space with the installation are we not drawn onward, we few, drawn onward to new era. Spanning the room is a photographic detail from the Pavilion’s onyx wall, a ready-made Rorschach test. The Pavilion’s temporal existence, prolonged by an unforeseen resurrection, is conjured by intervals of strobe flashes, backlighting the photograph and rendering unnoticed minutiae suddenly visible. The work’s palindrome title is both a complete sentence and a mirrored, incomplete fragment; it references the “era” of the 1930s (including the Barcelona Pavilion’s brief existence, the Weimar Republic’s decline and the rise of the Third Reich) while also posing a question that contains its own answer, reflected. The mixed temporalities occurring throughout 51 Days in June are literalized by the tricks and turns of are we not drawn onward’s title, the passage from past to present and back again. 

Christian Andersson was born in 1973 in Stockholm, and currently lives and works in Malmö. Recent solo exhibitions include “Landings 2” at Landings, Vestfossen, Norway (2010), "Three Steps to Rockefeller" at Fondazione Brodbeck, Catania (2009), "I Did It Just the Same”, Galerie Nordenhake, Stockholm (2008), Cristina Guerra Contemporary Art, Lisbon (2008), and "9 was 6 if", Studio A, Otterndorf (2005). Andersson has also participated in numerous group shows including the 1st Biennale for International Light Art, Ruhr (2010) and presentations at Centre d'art Passages, Troyes, France (2009), The Hessel Museum, New York (2009), Kunstverein Heidelberg, Germany (2007), Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2006), Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2006), Swiss Institute, New York (2005), Sala Rekalde, Bilbao (2005). In 2011 he will present a major solo exhibition at Moderna Museet, Malmö.

Galerie Nordenhake Berlin
Lindenstrasse 34
10969 Berlin
www.nordenhake.com
Tues-Sat 11 am - 6 pm

Spencer Finch, Amabilis Insania - Nordenhake, Berlin

Spencer Finch, Amabilis Insania
Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin
April 30 - June 5, 2010

Galerie Nordenhake in Berlin presents an exhibition by US artist SPENCER FINCH (born in 1962, lives in New York). The artist conceived new drawings, photographs and a light installation but also a sound installation and a sculpture. Themes uniting the diverse works in the show are the complexities and pleasures of apprehending sensations. Most of the works deal with misperceptions or misapprehensions. They are treated not necessarily as failure but as pleasurable moments hinting at a seeing prior to recognition and rationalisation.

The seduction of misperception is suggested in a group of photographs: in reality representations of cherry blossoms in a pond, they appear as delicate images of clouds in the sky bringing to mind Alfred Stieglitz’ series of abstract photographs “Equivalence”. In another work, the white concrete sculpture sitting directly on the gallery floor recalls a pile of snow. A similar irritation of our perception evokes the sound installation.

The artist maps the limits of his own field of vision in a drawing that compares far peripheral and central vision, but it also contrasts linguistic and visual descriptions of colour. Spencer Finch recorded the colour of a car rushing by on a highway once it appeared in his field of vision and painted his colour impression with pigments on paper. Like a researcher, he adds a written account of the vehicle's actual colour and form. The central vision differs from the perception in peripheral areas of the eye in respect to colour and form and proves it as erroneous.

The uncertainty of perception — that there is more to reality than our bodily senses could register — is implied in the series of eight drawings after false-colour images. The colourful oil pastels look entirely abstract but are in fact truly representational as they render thermograms of the light falling through the window in the artist’s studio over the course of one day.

Spencer Finch is known for a multi-layered artistic practice in which he explores the mechanism and mysteries of perception. Many of his poetic and witty works aim at preserving the memory of a sensorial experience, be it a pile of snow or moonlight in Venice. He bases his unconventional and meticulous representations on extended research and rigorous measurement while his art acknowledges the difference and distance of all representation and reinforces the beauty of the fleeting nature of the observed world.

Spencer Finch's artworks were previously presented in Berlin by Galerie Nordenhake in two exhibitions Spencer Finch: In Praise of Shadows (2007-2008) and Spencer Finch: Prussian Blue (2005).

NORDENHAKE
Gallery's website: www.nordenhake.com

Spencer Finch, In Praise of Shadows at Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin

Spencer Finch, In Praise of Shadows
Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin
December 1, 2007 - January 26, 2008

Galerie Nordenhake in Berlin presents an exhibition with new works by american artist SPENCER FINCH: In Praise of Shadows. Shadows are an always present element of Spencer Finch’s artistic exploration of the psychological and physiological aspects of perception and its limits. His current show at MASS MoCA exemplifies the wide range of ideas and visual modes with which Spencer Finch approaches the paradoxical nature of light and colour. The show “In Praise of Shadows”, however, is specifically devoted to the complex world of shadows. The title derives from Jun’ichiro Tanizaki’s short 1933 treatise, a meditation on the aesthetics of shadows in Japanese culture, threatened by the omnipresence of electric light: “Were it not for shadows, there would be no beauty”, Tanazaki states. Spencer Finch’s exhibition can be seen as a small visual anthology of shadows. A drawing from 1995 is exhibited alongside new watercolours, photographs, light installations, and smaller experimental installations that explore the diverse aspects of shadows.

One of the narrow walls alongside the large gallery window is painted in a monochrome grey colour, transporting the viewer to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s house in Weimar. The grey is an accurate chromatic replica of the colour of the shadow cast on a November day in the house where Goethe wrote his “Theory of Colour“ (1810), and where he most likely performed his experiments on coloured shadows. Goethe defined colour as the result of a dynamic interplay between light and darkness. Although Goethe’s theory was rejected in favour of Newton’s purely physical explanation, Goethe’s observations laid the groundwork for colour psychology.

A sequence of 12 photographs captures the transient shadows cast by a lemon tree over the course of a day. The artist travelled to Spain and took the photos at equal intervals from dawn till dusk to record the revolution of the sun around the tree. The work is inspired by a poem about a barren orange tree, written by Federico García Lorca, which adds a melancholic tone to the delicate photographic renderings and points to the long tradition of ascribing shadows deeper psychological meanings. Lorca’s orange tree invokes a woodcutter to cut away his shadow because it can’t stand the torment of seeing itself in its fruitless silhouette. 

Eugène Atget, master of the photographic conservation of old Paris, is honoured in a light installation in the second room of the gallery. Spencer Finch uses colour filters and fluorescent lights to re-create the exact darkness of the shadows cast in the Parisian alleyways that were photographed by Eugène Atget around 100 years ago. 

What remains constant in Spencer Finch’s work is that he merges dry, scientific methods of measurement and documentation with his subjective creative expression, here demonstrating that shadows are far more than regions of darkness where light is blocked. Rather, they are optical shapes that beckon towards a subjective sublime, reflecting the human condition of never being able to completely know what exists in nature, waiting in the shadows for a stroke of lightning.

NORDENHAKE Berlin, Germany
Gallery's website: www.nordenhake.com

Spencer Finch, Prussian Blue - Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin

Spencer Finch, Prussian Blue
Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin
March 5 - April 9, 2005

Galerie Nordenhake in Berlin presents its first solo exhibition with the American artist SPENCER FINCH. For a viewer acquainted to Spencer Finch's work this exhibition reveal well-known and recurrent themes. We have references to philosophical phenomenology and psychology of perception: What does it actually mean to experience a colour? What is seeing? How do we communicate experiences? How can a sensual stimulus trig an existential reconstruction of a cultural context - as in the case of the famous Madeleine in Marcel Proust's Recherche? And how can such a context be shared? Spencer Finch has worked consistently with these questions during his career as an artist. "Prussian Blue" is yet another step in the development of a deeply personal "Cultural Colour Doctrine" that involves such disparate phenomena as the pink colour of Jacqueline Kennedy's hat the day her husband, the President, was shot, or the tone of the ceiling above the sofa in Sigmund Freud's examination room, and the shade of blue in the sky over the place where the first atomic bomb was developed in the desert of Los Alamos in 1945.

For his first solo exhibition in Berlin, Spencer Finch delves into Prussian blue, the pigment that was the first artificial pigment, and invented in this very city by Heinrich Diesbach some 300 years ago. Suddenly blue was for the first time available as an affordable colour, both commercially and artistically. Its use quickly spread to textiles and it was notably used to dye the uniforms of the Prussian army. In the 19th century it showed itself useful for the early photographical pioneers and was used for cyanotypes or blueprints.

Prussian Blue, 2005 is a three-dimensional model of the molecular structure of said pigment, executed using standard light bulbs in different sizes. As all Spencer Finch's works, the chandelier is representational. This is in fact what the pigment looks like on the molecular level.

In Self Portrait as Crazy Horse, 1995-2005, a large site specific cyanotype photograph made directly on the wall, Spencer Finch again connects to the use of Prussian blue but also to the German fascination with Indians as manifested in the huge success of Karl May's stories. Using the whole gallery space and its large windows as a camera and a gesso-primed, and photosensitised wall as the "film", he spends a day in front of the wall, using the time from sunrise to sunset as exposure time. The final result is a cyanotype made directly on the wall that shows himself as the famous Indian chief. The cyanotype process uses the same components as the ones found in Prussian blue and gives an image traced in white on a blue background. In the work, which hovers between, painting, photography and performance, the artist seems to appear as a white shadow on the wall. Or is it only your imagination? Crazy Horse was a Lakota warrior and mystic who successfully lead an uprising that culminated in the battle of Little Big Horn, also known as Custer's Last Stand. However, even if occupying a place in our collective memory, and even if coming from an era when photography already played a significant role in defining historical key figures and places, Crazy Horse never allowed anyone to take his picture, "Why would you wish to shorten my life by taking from me my shadow?"

The main work that Spencer Finch has made especially for the exhibition is an installation called Two Examples of Molecular Orbital Theory (Prussian Blue) 2005. Blue light is seen coming from two large door openings leading in to large light-filled rooms. Both appear blue, but the colour is achieved by different means. Again the artist questions what we see but also shows faith in representing the unattainable - be it the colour of Jackie's pillbox hat or the elusive position of electrons in a molecule. Similar ideas come back in a series of water-colours, Study for a Transparent Language, Index of Prussian Blue (35 watercolour drawings), 2005, that catalogues alphabetically 35 different names for the pigment, ranging from American Blue to Williamson's Blue. But again, does anyone know what blue is?

This is Spencer Finch's first solo exhibition at Galerie Nordenhake. In 2003 he participated in the gallery's exhibition on painting, "Pale Fire", with the light installation New York Boogie Woogie, 2003, (the light at Times Square on the night of April 27, 2003).

NORDENHAKE Berlin
www.nordenhake.com