Jutta Jentges Exhibition, Galerie Art Cru Berlin

Jutta Jentges 
Galerie ART CRU Berlin 
Through 16 November 2013

JUTTA JENTGES 

Uber die Meere 1, 2000

Acryl auf Hartfaser und Pappmachée, 64x54

Image Courtesy Galerie ART CRU Berlin

Galerie ART CRU Berlin is showing around 30 works by JUTTA JENTGES. She finished her studies at the Academy of the Arts in Nurenmberg in 1987 and exhibited among other places in Fürth, Bielefeld, Leipzig, Hamburg and 1999 at the Goethe Institute Sydney. After her retreat from the public since 2005, Galerie ART CRU Berlin presents a broad show of works by the artist - and her first one in Berlin. 

JUTTA JENTGES (b. 1961, Erlangen) is fascinated by the perfection of the imperfect since more then 30 years. She creates collages and assemblages out of wood and metal left overs, plastic and paper shreds, fabrics, scrap and broken glass. She joins found objects and materials and paints figures like angels, saints, animals and fools on them. By combining old, thrown-away junk of the consumer society with her newly applied painting unique works are coming into being.

JUTTA JENTGES 

Morgenland, 2002 

Acryl- und Bleistift auf Holz, 45x95

Image Courtesy Galerie ART CRU Berlin 

Her motifs, painted with a simplistic, primary symbolism seem like they came from another world. For Jutta Jentges painting is at the same time a religious practice and a rigorous examination of herself torn between the tensions of life. Her works show men and transcendental beings between religion and sexuality, between wildness and holiness. The spirituality of the images is however constantly grounded by the material presence of her installations, sometimes even broken by it. Inside the richness of the junk used by Jutta Jentges the artist keeps a special fascination for wooden materials. She integrates –carefully and ruthless at the same time – the unadorned fragility, roughness and rawness of the old boards with all of their wounds and holes into her assemblages. Their uniqueness is based on this very union of the antithetic elements in the work of Jutta Jentges: the openly shown fragile momentariness of the used materials and the timeless auratic beauty of her idiosyncratic, iconic style of painting.

Jutta Jentges' Selected exhibitions: 1990, Galerie Kohlenhof, Nuremberg; 1991, Galerietage Fürth; 1994 World Congress for social psychiatry, Hamburg; 1995 Galerie Durchblick e.V. Leipzig; 1997 Ravensburger Spinnerei Bielefeld, 1998, Kunsthaus Nuremberg, 1999 Goetheinstitut, Sydney, Australia

Galerie ART CRU Berlin
Kunsthof, Oranienburger Str. 27, 10117 Berlin, Germany
www.art-cru.de 

Drawing Machines at Gregor Podnar Gallery Berlin

Cimento dell’armonia e dell’invenzione:
or, The Drawing Machines
Galerija Gregor Podnar, Berlin
Through January 8, 2011

Artists: William Anastasi, Anna Barham, Emanuele Becheri, Alighiero Boetti, Ane Mette Hol, Albin Karlsson, Tim Knowles, Nick Laessing, Sol LeWitt, Giovanni Morbin, Marc Nagtzaam, Goran Petercol, Diogo Pimentão, Steve Roden, Jean Tinguely.

Cimento dell’armonia e dell’invenzione (“Trial of Harmony and Invention”) is the title of a 1969 work by ALIGHIERO BOETTI, a series of drawings in which he traced the lines of sheets of graph paper following a different path each time. A work that opposes established order (“armonia”) and the creation of something new (“invenzione”). The idea of both being at odds with each other is interesting, especially if it is applied to machinery and draughtsmanship.

The exhibition focuses on artists who produce drawings with machines or mechanisms following the path opened by JEAN TINGUELY’s drawing (and painting) machines Méta-Matics, but also by self imposed rules echoing the mathematical basis of mechanical procedures, such as Alighiero Boetti himself, SOL LEWITT, WILLIAM ANASTASI...

In fact, from the mid XXth century on, artistic drawing has been partly predicated upon drawing machines or mechanisms. Even in a broader and historical view, which has certainly influenced this phenomenon, drawing has been associated with mechanics in a combination of recreational and scientific uses. From the Jacquet-Droz automaton, which could draw (1772) to a machine inscribing on a sheet of paper the trajectory of a falling body, invented by Arthur Morin (1864), drawing has been both imitated and used. Etienne-Jules Marey, the inventor of chronophotography and other breathtaking experimental devices, researched the graphic translation of the body’s movements through the sphygmograph and the cardiograph, for instance, which were able to “draw” the beating of the human heart.

At first, it could seem odd that drawing, a hand-based craft par excellence, was to be included in the domain of machine-made articles. But on closer inspection, automata imitating the skills of the draughtsman upset the standards by which drawing is normally adjudged as such and announce modernity: they demonstrate the mechanic aspect of drawing without destroying its appeal. Rather, they increase it. A triangular relation between the viewer, the artist and the machine, is thus implemented. The act of creation is assumed by others, namely the machine itself, while the artist operates like one. Drawing with, or like, a machine implies an alliance of the hand, the eye, the mind, the device, the artifact, the formula and the rule.

The contemplative and epistemological role of mimesis and utility are at stake here. For from this point on, the extraction of drawn data as well as the graphic transposition of the movement of matter moulds a different and modern beauty, largely based on abstraction and, the moment drawing becomes the result of self-applied rules or exterior factors, chance-based opportunities for the unpredictable emerges. Charles Baudelaire sensed this rather early when he confessed that a fine drawing captivates us beyond what it depicts ( in L’Oeuvre et la vie d’Eugène Delacroix, 1863).

On the other hand, freed from intention and traditional ideas of quality, and fascinated by machines, the artist chooses to work programmatically. Therefore, this abstract beauty is sometimes generated by a hand carefully automated by seriality and a rigorous set of rules.

But to return to Alighiero Boetti, a debate is then established as to what, exactly, one considers “harmony” and “invention” to be: would the mechanical aspect of drawing (i.e., order) be harmony? But aren’t machines, as actual mechanism or as rules and protocols, inventions? Should one consider chance itself to be the source of “invention”, as opposed to a system? Thus does this show aim to reveal the complexity and ambiguity that lurks behind such seemingly definite categories.

Cimento dell’armonia e dell’invenzione: or, The Drawing Machines showcases historical and recent works exploring this path of contradictions between the skilled machine and the automated draughtsman, connected by the mesmerizing appeal of their abstract productions, and so much more.

The exhibition is curated by SIMONE MENEGOI and accompanied by a writing of JOANA NEVES, The Drawing Automaton, or the Mechanics of Drawing.

GALERIJA GREGOR PODNAR BERLIN
Lindenstr. 35 - 10969 Berlin - Germany

www.gregorpodnar.com 

13.11.2010 - 08.01.2011

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