Exhibition "beyond now. Editions" @ Kestner Gesellschaft, Hanover

beyond now. Editions

Kestner Gesellschaft, Hanover

December 7, 2024 - March 2, 2025

Artists:

Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc, Franz Ackermann, Rebecca Ackroyd, Nevin Aladağ, Lewis Baltz, Monika Baer, Thomas Bayrle, Bernhard und Anna Blume, Erik Bulatov, André Butzer, Katinka Bock, Armin Boehm, Cecily Brown, Fernando Bryce, Helen Cammock, Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Jake & Dinos Chapman, Louisa Clement, Ceal Floyer, FAMED, Rochelle Feinstein, Peter Fischli & David Weiss, FORT, Nan Goldin, Guerilla Girls, Gotthard Graubner, Diango Hernández, Camille Henrot, Roger Hiorns, Gary Hume, Bethan Huws, Monilola Olayemi Ilupeju, Olav Christopher Jenssen, Anna K.E., Alex Katz, Hassan Khan, Joachim Koester, Marlena Kudlicka, Rezi van Lankveld, Jochen Lempert, Kris Martin, Jakob Mattner, Rita McBride, Henri Michaux, Sarah Morris, Chris Ofili, Lucila Pacheco Dehne, Peter Piller, Joanna Piotrowska, Paula Rego, Michael Sailstorfer, Susanne Sachsse & Xiu Xiu, Vittorio Santoro, Yehudit Sasportas, Dana Schutz, Bettina Scholz, Marinella Senatore, Santiago Sierra, Roman Signer, Simon Starling, Florian Süssmayr, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Hann Trier, The Institute of Queer Ecology, Tim Ulrichs, Ursula (Schultze-Bluhm), Ella Walker, Phoebe Washburn, Paloma Varga Weisz, James Welling, Christopher Williams, Samson Young, Heimo Zobernig, Thomas Zipp.

With beyond now. Editions, the Kestner Gesellschaft reflects on its exhibition history and the connection between artistic production and institutional work. This special exhibition includes both current and rediscovered limited-edition works, combining them with a series of related exhibition posters. A visual timeline traces the historical context of the works, their thematic connections to contemporary events, and their significance for the programmatic development of the Kestner Gesellschaft. Past and present intertwine in a vibrant dialogue that offers impetuses for future perspectives and makes the relationships between art, institutions, and society tangible.

The posters and limited-edition works refer to the diverse thematic exhibitions and projects that address societal and artistic questions of recent years: Tenderness (2022) focused on sensitivity and vulnerability, Anabasis (2023) explored movement and return, and Between Past and Future (2024) addresses Hannah Arendt’s thoughts on social responsibility and memory.

Since its founding in 1916, the Kestner Gesellschaft has collaborated closely with artists to release limited editions several times a year. These works form an essential part of its activities and significantly contribute to the accessibility, promotion, and visibility of contemporary art. beyond now. Editions not only offers the opportunity to explore the history of the institution’s exhibitions and limited-edition works but also to purchase these works.

In addition to historical works, the exhibition presents two new limited-edition works: Paloma Varga Weisz displays bronze sculptures from her series Wild People (2024), inspired by mythical and archetypal figures. And Monilola Olayemi Ilupeju presents her handmade book BloodLetter (2024), which interweaves personal stories in poems, essays and journal entries.

Environmental issues are an important concern for the Kestner Gesellschaft. The exhibition was designed for sustainability by using only existing interior equipment. This concept reflects a responsible approach to resource management and underscores the institution’s endeavor to address current challenges not only thematically but also practically.

Curator: Alexander Wilmschen

KESTNER GASELLSCHAFT

Goseriede 11, 30159 Hannover

www.kestnergesellschaft.de 

Paloma Varga Weisz @ Kestner Gesellschaft, Hanover - "Multiface" Exhibition

Paloma Varga Weisz: Multiface

Kestner Gesellschaft, Hanover

December 7, 2024 - March 2, 2025

Kestner Gesellschaft, Hanover

© Photographer: Ulrich Prigge

The exhibition Multiface is one of the most extensive presentations of works by Paloma Varga Weisz. It brings together her recent series of works with key pieces from over three decades, offering insight into her poetic and simultaneously subversive artistic practice. Her works—sculptures, watercolors, drawings, and installations—delve into existential questions about identity, memory, vulnerability, and transformation. Figures and forms oscillate between the familiar and the foreign, the corporeal and the narrative.

Trained as a wood sculptor, Paloma Varga Weisz deliberately breaks with the tradition of the craft. By mastering traditional techniques while simultaneously subverting them, she creates works that challenge classical notions of materiality and form. Her sculptures combine historical references with surreal elements, humorous disruptions, and subtle irony, impressively exploring the boundaries between artisanal precision and contemporary reflection.

A central focus of the exhibition is Wild People (1998—2024), a series of works ranging from small ceramic figures to monumental bronze sculptures. These hybrid beings, which combine human and animal traits, embody a deconstruction of gender roles and family ideals. They raise questions about isolation, community, and transitions from humans to nature. The sculpture Rug People (2011) plays a special role in this exhibition: Inspired by the story of the former railway station in Folkstone in England from which soldiers departed for battle during World War I, this work reflects on themes such as migration, loss, and the fragility of human stories. For Varga Weisz, this also becomes a quiet homage to her father, who had to flee from National Socialists-occupied Paris during World War II as a Jewish refugee. Rug People (2011) functions as a monument to the resilience and vulnerability of human experiences.

Multiface (2019), a multi-faced silver head that looks in all directions, symbolizes the fluid boundaries of the self and the constant changes of life. The multiheaded nature of her works invites viewers to understand identity not as a selfcontained unit, but as an open, evolving structure that sees breaks and transitions as essential components of being. Multiface reveals the complexity of the human—not as an ambivalence to be overcome, but as its essential strength.

Paloma Varga Weisz (b. 1966 in Mannheim) is a sculptor, graphic artist, and painter. After training as a wood sculptor from 1987 to 1990 in Garmisch- Partenkirchen, she studied under Tony Cragg and Gerhard Merz at the Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 1990 to 1998. Her works poetically and subversively engage with themes such as identity, memory, and transformation. Varga Weisz lives and works in Düsseldorf.

Curator: Alexander Wilmschen

KESTNER GASELLSCHAFT

Goseriede 11, 30159 Hannover

www.kestnergesellschaft.de

Monilola Olayemi Ilupeju @ Kestner Gesellschaft, Hanover - "BloodLetter" Exhibition

Monilola Olayemi Ilupeju

BloodLetter 

Kestner Gesellschaft, Hanover

December 7, 2024 - March 2, 2025

Monilola Olayemi Ilupeju 

V. & Blue Tree, 2024

Courtesy of the artist, PSM, Berlin and private collection

Monilola Olayemi Ilupeju 

Grandpa’s Balcony, 2024 

Courtesy the artist

Monilola Olayemi Ilupeju

„(No) Fear”, 2024

Courtesy the artist, PSM, Berlin, 

and The Yelmani Collection

“breeze blocks, bare toes, dripping water,

peeling turquoise, eyelet lace dancing on concrete.

morning prayers on the roof,

after-school tutoring on the balcony,

movie nights in the parlor.

oh man.

grandma buried in the backyard, next to the other wives,

drying clothes spread out across the lawn like a fleet of warm shadows.

to know you is to love you.”

Monilola Olayemi Ilupeju, 2024

BloodLetter is the first institutional solo exhibition by the Nigerian-American artist Monilola Olayemi Ilupeju. At its heart is the artist’s book of the same name, a handcrafted leather-bound work made specifically for the show at the Kestner Gesellschaft. This book forms the conceptual core of the exhibition and embodies key motifs that shape the artist’s practice: ancestry, memory, grief, healing, and the complex connection between individual and collective narratives.

Serving as much more than a collection of texts, BloodLetter functions as a personal archive. Poems, essays, letters, and journal entries address questions of identity, belonging, and migration: autobiographical reflections intertwine with universal themes including intergenerational trauma, resilience, familial ties, and cultural transformation. The book is presented in the exhibition within a specially designed installation made of clay elements called “breeze blocks,” inspired by the cement blocks used by her grandfather in the construction of his home. This pavilion creates an intimate space within the exhibition itself, both protective and porous, while also highlighting the artist’s book as both a physical and conceptual center of the exhibition.

The exhibition focuses on Monilola Olayemi Ilupeju’s large-scale paintings on leather and small sculptures made of birch, whose symbols and personal motifs expand the thematic range of the exhibition. Ilupeju combines painting, installations, and text in her practice, making visible the fractures and overlays of memory through unconventional media and surfaces modified with scratch marks and pyrographic techniques. Her works link personal and collective narratives, questioning traditional archiving while opening spaces where stories can be told in depth. In particular, the relationships with her family and thoughts on homeland and diaspora are a common thread throughout her works.

The title BloodLetter refers on one hand to the central role of blood as a metaphor in Ilupeju’s work. For the artist, blood signifies life, connection, trauma, and the transmission of stories. On the other hand, “Letter” points to recorded written and spoken language, asemic writing, the documentation and reshaping of narratives. Together, the interplay of these ideas creates an artistic concept that explores the relationship between body, language, and history.

Monilola Olayemi Ilupeju (b. 1996) is a multimedia artist and writer. In her paintings, texts, performances, and installations, she balances her own experiences of connection, violence, and healing with broader considerations of cultural distortions and identity. Monilola Olayemi Ilupeju lives and works in Berlin.

Curator: Alexander Wilmschen

KESTNER GASELLSCHAFT

Goseriede 11, 30159 Hannover

www.kestnergesellschaft.de

Monika Baer @ Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover

Monika Baer
Große Spritztour
Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover
Through 13 november 2016

Monika Baer

CMYK | 2016

Courtesy the artist and Galerie Weiss, Berlin

The Kestner Gesellschaft presents the exhibition Große Spritztour by the German painter Monika Baer. The focus of the exhibition will be three new series of works that share the common theme of alcohol. They will be supplemented with numerous paintings, drawings, and collages from the past two decades.

Monika Baer

L | 2014

Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts, Museum purchase, 

Wachenheim Familiy Fund, M.2014.16

Monika Baer humorously uses various approaches to painting: figuration and abstraction, supposedly expressive gestures and sensitive details seem to compete with one another. At times the narrative potential is emphasized, and at others the material literalness of the picture; at times the canvas seems like a window on the world, and at others like an object in the world. This tension is evident within individual pictures as well as between series of works: in the large-scale alcohol series, the canvas becomes a stage along whose lower edge hyperrealistic bottles are arranged in rows like actors. In the background expressive painting forms a kind of scenery.

Monika Baer

Überlieferung verpflichtet | 2014

Courtesy the artist, Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin, and Greene Naftali, New York

While the large canvases make use of realistic depiction and a light color palette, the mid-sized alcohol pictures are dominated by an iridescent black that seems like negatives of the light-colored series. Stenciled labels from alcoholic drinks float on the dark background; here and there they encounter dabs of paint applied directly from the tube in pastels, mirrors, thickly applied flecks of color, and rainbow motifs. These two series juxtapose light and dark, illusionistic and emblematic representation, pictures and text. Both are also suffused with a tension between things and symbols. In the third, small-scale alcohol-themed series, this tension is again accentuated: miniature bottles of various kinds of alcohol are depicted along the outer edges of the paintings. In this way, the painting oscillates between referential and literal systems of reference.

Monika Baer

on hold (dregs) | 2015

Privatsammlung

The exhibition shows Monika Baer’s continually developing vocabulary and augments it with drawings and collages that have formed their own universe in her work. In the most recent series, however, drawing appears as a disorienting element on the canvases: drawn heads of animals and people emerge from the expressive backgrounds like hallucinations, or sit like graffiti on the canvas. As part of the world portrayed in the picture or as an external commentary, the drawings here are additional figures of the dialectic reversals that the painter encourages her audience to make.

MONIKA BAER studied under Alfonso Hüppi at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 1985 to 1992. Her works have been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions at the Bonnefantenmuseum in Maastricht (2005), the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich (2006), and Documenta 12 in Kassel (2007), among others. Major retrospectives of her work were presented most recently in the United States in 2012 at the Art Institute of Chicago and in 2014 at the Williams College Museum of Art in Williamstown. Monika Baer lives in Berlin and teaches at the Milton Avery School of Fine Art at Bard College in New York and at the Städelschule in Frankfurt.

The exhibition at the Kestner Gesellschaft was developed in cooperation with the Museum Abteiberg in Mönchengladbach. A catalog will be published in German and English.

The exhibition Monika Baer: Große Spritztour is supported by the Stiftung Niedersachsen, the Stiftung Kunstfonds, and the Friends of the Kestner Gesellschaft.

Curator: Christina Végh
Assistant curator: Milan Ther

Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover
www.kestnergesellschaft.de