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TAUCHFAHRTEN (DIVING TRIPS) - Drawing as Reportage

Title of the catalogue

He Youzhi: Images enchaînés - Autobiographie des années de jeunesse, Drawing (Detail), 1997

27. November 2004 - 30. January 2005

TAUCHFAHRTEN (DIVING TRIPS) is a thematic exhibition project that intends to examine the relationship between visibility and invisibility in contemporary art based on the medium of drawing. This discussion based on the perspective of the drawing has proven itself to be fruitful because its basic ambivalence between being a preparatory work, usually a sketch, that remains invisible to the viewer, and a valid, autonomous work that encompasses the above mentioned balance between disappearance and presence. In addition, the exhibition, the concept of which is being prepared by Clemens Krümmel (Texte zur Kunst) and the draughtsman Alexander Roob, will not just present a conventional panorama of the various aspects of drawings, but rather has the goal of also clarifying traditional positions of drawings, which has previously remained in the dark. In this regard, the historical development of the international link between drawing and reportage will play a decisive role in the exhibition. This also encompasses, aside from autobiographical and/or historical news coverage drawings that approach the narrative structure of comic strips, such heterogeneous fields as court sketches, social utopian design sketches, dream protocols and complex origami. Historical as well as contemporary examples will be included so that an abundance of art historical as well as current links to the concept of reportage drawings can be illuminated. Reportage serves here as term implying a large number of artistic practices that are explicitly related to experiences, which can be recovered from normally unseen and hard-to-reach and sites, “divings” from places where photography is forbidden, like prisons, hospitals and courtrooms, or from inner spaces of the imagination, in which planning-abstract or concrete-utopian thought can be formed.

Positions: Jessica Abel, Monika Baer, David B., Steve Bell, Tatjana Bergius, Peter Blegvad, Bernard Buffet, David Collier, Alice Creischer, Erich Dittmann, Alberto Giacometti, Wolfgang Grunwald, Constantin Guys, Hokusai, Ben Katchor, Max Klinger, Friederike Klotz, Fritz Koch-Gotha, Tünde Kovács, Willibald Krain, Ulli Lust, Theo Matejko, Henry Moore, Stephan Mörsch , Ri Tong Chan, Harvey Pekar, Kai Pfeiffer, Inna Poltorychin,Alexander Roob, Joe Sacco, Salon de Fleurus, Alfred Schmidt, Dierk Schmidt, Jim Shaw, Andreas Siekmann, Emil Stumpp, Susan Turcot, Rick Veitch , Amelie von Wulffen , Robert Weaver, Stephen Wiltshire, Eric Wunder, He Youzhi, Florian Zeyfang

PANORAMA — 82nd Fall Exhibition of Lower-Saxony Artists

18. September - 7.November

As the only overview show dealing with contemporary art in Lower Saxony, the Fall Exhibition has a great deal of importance for the cultural and art political profile of the state. In order to give the breadth of the positions developed here an adequate platform, the Kunstverein looks for further exhibition partners for every presentation, and to provide as intensive an overview of the most important Lower Saxon positions as possible, our search is limited to sites in Hannover. For the coming Fall Exhibition PANORAMA, it was possible to obtain two additional exhibition venues, the Kunsthalle Faust and the privately operated Kesselhaus (Boiler House), which programmatically as spatially are ideal to attractively enlarge the Kunstverein's offerings. The Fall Exhibition does not understand itself to be a conglomeration for the art of the region, but rather as a precise platform for excellent works. Quality is thus a high priority in the selection of the participating artists. Traditionally, the winners of studio stipendiums in the “Villa Minimo” and the exhibition in the Kunstverein that goes along with the Prize of the Kunstverein Hannover, as well as the winner of Art Prize of the Sparkasse Hannover are chosen within the framework of the Fall Exhibition. A top-class national jury chooses the participating artists as well as the prizewinners. The exhibition, which will be supplemented by many events, will be accompanied by a catalog containing a commentated overview of the exhibition venues and art colleges in Lower Saxony.

Prize of Kunstverein Hannover: Stefan Jeep and Ho-Yeol Ryu.
Prize of Sparkasse Hannover: Frank Rosenthal.

Further artists presented at Fall Exhibition: Daniel Behrendt, Urte Brandes, Rebekka Brunke, Thomas Cena, Derk Claassen, CLAP – Clube de Arte Porto/Daniel Schürer, Thomas Dillmann, Christian Dootz, Harald Falkenhagen, Dieter Froelich, Christoph Girardet, Jutta Haeckel, Peter Heber, Christian Helwing, Petra Kaltenmorgen, Hans Karl, Wolfgang Kessler, Florian Krautkrämer, Sandra Kuhne, Lotte Lindner, Sylwia Ludas, Hannes Malte Mahler, Reiner Matysik, Stefan Mauck, Florian Merkel, Christiane Möbus, Christian Nolting, Poison Idea, Uwe Schinn, Julia Schmid, Christine Schulz, Marina Schulze, Rüdiger Stanko, Timm Ulrichs, Matten Vogel, Hans-Albert Walter, Raimund Zakowski

INGRID CALAME / MATHILDE TER HEIJNE / JÖRG WAGNER

INGRID CALAME UUHNgggg, 1998 Enamel paint on aluminium 122 x 122 cm Courtesy Galerie Rolf Ricke, Köln

MATHILDE TER HEIJNE What I Don't Want, 2001 Installation (lifesize doll, clothes, CD-player, amplifier) Courtesy Galerie Arndt & Partner, Berlin

JÖRG WAGNER capsule69, 2001 Polyester, 250 x 150 x 150 cm - "69" video Courtesy Galerie Luis Campaña, Köln

10. Juli - 5. September 2004

With Ingrid Calame (born 1965), Mathilde ter Heijne (born 1969) and Jörg Wagner (born 1967) the Kunstverein Hannover presents three young artists, whose complex and promising works have until now been seen in part by a larger German public only. Their medial and contextual methods are, however, too diverse, that a joint exhibition can be comfortably united under the singular label of a thematic show. It is nevertheless not our intention to present three separate solo exhibitions simultaneously, but rather to develop a kind of essay in the form of an exhibition, focusing on the correspondences and associative relationships between each of the three artists and their thematic central positions.

In spite of their differences, Ingrid Calame's paintings, which are equally figurative and autonomous, ter Heijne's performance-like, autobiographically charged installations, and Wagner's emotionally saturated projections, expose a high-voltage relationship of projection and investigation. The concurrences of interior and exterior, of visible and invisible and of hidden and revealed, produces a chamber music-like venture encompassing juxtaposition and cooperation, in which the works of each of these three artists posture themselves in constantly new relationships to others.

The paintings of Ingrid Calame, who was born in New York, and now lives and works in Los Angeles, are positioned in a shadowy zone between an abstraction that is devoid of reference and an eminent regard to reality and space. The surfaces of her paintings are made up of separate autonomous incidences of color. The brightly colored stains indicate gestures and chance as well as dynamics and composition simultaneously, and appear as if they were poured onto a canvas during an action painting performance, yet they are all clearly contoured and are set in a classical “hard edge” manner.

The ambivalence, which can be equally felt in a small panel picture and in the monumental wall painting, can only be meaningfully resolved when the ostensible appearance of the surface is questioned. All of these flecks are indeed accidental gestures, but the places where they were first made as well as their initial intentions are as far removed from the visible image painted with enamels on aluminum as one could imagine. In a complex process, everyday stains found on the ground or on the streets are individually drawn with tracing paper and than reassembled to create new arrangements, only to be traced again and transferred to the surface of the painting.

This fascinating moment of transferal has dimensions that extend beyond space and format, especially when, like within the framework of the exhibition for the Kunstverein Hannover, the collected and rearranged stains are put together to form broad-scale constellations that take up entire walls and series of rooms.

The oeuvre of Mathilde ter Heijne, who was born in Strasbourg and now works in Berlin and Amsterdam, deals with projections and transferals between public and private spaces in a completely different way. On the dissolving boarders between social and biographical discourses, ter Heijne stages herself, or a dummy of herself, as a suicide murderer, whose violent acts are primarily directed at her own person. The installative Video and CD-ROM works are consciously placed in a political/terrorism context by including texts from various sources dealing with the phenomenon of suicide as a political weapon. The enormous emotional impact results, however, primarily from the complex amalgamation of guilt and desperation, of fanaticism and self-sacrifice, of egoism and ideology based primarily on an intimate, personal moment of appropriating and experiencing the personalities and philosophies of other persons.

This complex interaction of identity and projection is heightened in a very special way in a work that is entirely non-political on the surface. In it, she assumes the personality of fictional women artists of the last century by providing her dummies with a face and a voice. In different clothes and with a blank expression, ter Heijne stares into the gallery three times. From the inward looking, worried self-portraits seen reading passages from “their” novels using ter Heijne's voice, a complex, emotionally intensified no-man's-land is created, in which we can expect the actual artist only as a multiple construction and as a multifaceted camouflage.

The paper rooms created by Jörg Wagner, who was born in Waiblingen and now lives in Cologne, are primarily projections in the true, formalistic sense of the term. Large sheets of photo paper cover the walls of an apparently normal, everyday room. After all the pieces of furniture are returned to their original positions, Wagner exposes the room and then removes the sheets of photo paper for development. The paper after-images of existing rooms are fragile tents, providing the interior spaces with a sculptural, exterior that remains an ephemeral and sensitive Platzhalter. Wagner's night blue shimmering puzzle between inside and outside perspicaciously transports the flat, non-spatial photographic image to the third dimension, revealing itself in a second step to be an emotionally occupied place that is biographical in the broadest sense of the term. Children's rooms and studio bunks thus become “image worthy”, like the dwelling of a distantly related opal prospector in the Australian outback.

The biography of this relative, who worked as an extra in the movie Mad Max, subsequently provides the basis for quite a few similarly biographically motivated enterprises. Individual road movie sequences are padded with the life of the distant uncle, and the tents mutate to amorphous one-man cinemas of his Mad Max adaptation that retain the subjective tension of the paper rooms.

Calame's, ter Heijne's und Wagner's intelligent and promising concepts are united in Hannover to form a discursive juxtaposition that is multifaceted in terms of aesthetics and contents, and yet still striking and sovereign in and of themselves. The comprehensive three-part catalogue documents each of the individual oeuvres separately, but also illustrates their multi-layered juxtapositions.

PLATFORM #1

bill motive PLATTFORM#1

In front of the Kunstverein, Sophienstrasse 2, Hannover, Janin Benecke, Vera Frese und Björn Kahle installed "Eine sich im Aufbau befindende Dekonstruktion."

On View in Room 1, right: Ilka Theurich, sound installation "Mein zitronengelber Plastikbecher". Left: Janina Wick, "Jugendbilder", C-Prints 2003/2004.

The Kunstverein Hannover understands itself to be a point of intersection for imparting regional, national and international contemporary art. At the regional level, the Fall Exhibition, which takes place every two years, is the only institution in Lower Saxony that consistently presents an overview of excellent local young artistic positions. With PLATTFORM, intended as an annual event, the Kunstverein wishes on the one hand to increase awareness of the regional art scene and to draw public attention to the important connection between education, training and exhibition communication on the other. With this in mind, PLATTFORM is conceived as a cooperative project with the two large art colleges in Lower Saxony, the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Braunschweig and the Fachhochschule Hannover. At the center of the first venture, which will be carried out together with the Fachhochschule Hannover, is a concept that is vastly different from the usual exhibitions of master class students. Instead of just using the Kunstverein as a simple venue, it will become the open stage for a workshop during a long weekend. The exhibition planned within this framework is designed to be an open work in progress. Concretely, this means that a jury made up of colleagues from the Kunstverein, teachers from the visual arts faculty and from other institutions will choose in a joint discussion works by students of the faculty that are not just the static product of an exhibition, but should be a flexible, processual offering, the form of which can change and be altered based on varying influences during the course of the four days.

Participating artists:
Frank Bartz, Janin Benecke/Vera Frese/Björn Kahle, Sigtryggur Berg-Sigmarsson, Vera Burmester/Anja Steckling, Sebastian Biskup, Gabriella Coccioli, GRUPPE GOXIN, Hidetaka Imaizumi/Katzumi Narukawa, Agnieszka Jurek, Christiane Konietzny, Claus Lehmann, Christof Mascher, Susanne Neubauer, Sonja Niedt, Imke Rathert/Christian Desbonnets, RECHERCHEFAHRT BAUERNHOF Anne-Lena Boettcher/Andrzej Gosek/Christof Mascher/Eugen Kunkel/Claus Lehmann, Michael Steup, Franziska Stünkel, Gaby Taplick, Ilka Theurich, Martina Vollmer, Janina Wick, Silke Zeidler, Walter Zurborg.

Peter Kogler

ohne Titel, 2004. Installation view Kunstverein Hannover, Photo: Raimund Zakowski

24. April - 20.June 2004

The works by the Austrian artist Peter Kogler (born 1959), a two-time Documenta participant, are made up of only a few sign-like elements. Since 1984, he has developed complicated and enterable labyrinths on walls, floors and ceilings from motifs of the human brain, ants and pipes. Unlike any other contemporary artistic oeuvre, he formulates specific images for a world that is increasingly being ruled by the flow of information and electronic communications, and connects this visualization simultaneously to the physical experience of placelessness and disorientation. The persuasiveness of his works is essentially due to their congenial connection to the room. With the help of printed wallpaper, curtains and video projections, he turns the architectural space in question into a seemingly virtual suite that is endless and bottomless at the same time and whose dynamic intertwinings seem to engulf the viewer. Formally reflecting the traditions of Minimalist and Conceptual spatial art from Sol LeWitt and Joseph Kosuth to Daniel Buren, Kogler has succeeded in developing his repertoire of drawings in such a way that it attains the status of a visual “brand”, receiving a label without endangering his multi-faceted and complex ability to connect to very different themes and subjects. In a consciously contradictory manner, Kogler's works are always “empty” projection surfaces and contextually charged spaces for the reflection of post material realities. Developed serially, the eternally repeated decorative schemes formulate the white smoke of an allover on which any addressing of meaning is condemned to failure. As concrete motifs, they become enigmatic ciphers for universal contextual chargings. This is why, for example, the illusionary gray pipe forms can be read as a polyvalent: as a pure design, as a organic-like construction or architecture, as a metaphor for the complicated system of veins and arteries in our body, as a microscopically greatly enlarged image of the workings of a brain and, finally, as the visualization of electronic grids and high-power information highways. These associative synapses, which Kogler's motives consistently present balanced between the macrocosmical and microcosmical perspective, are not to be confused with a contextual taking of sides. The artist formulates a display in which the relationship between body, information and space is made visible a structure of labyrinth-like interdependence, but are not judged. Like an x-ray, he examines our reality and creates a surface design with, the interpretation of which is placed in our hands. Equally entrenched between a scrupulous criticism and affirmation of the media, Peter Kogler presents us the world as a seemingly virtual phantasmagoria, in which the usually invisible suddenly can be seen. This visible presence highlights simultaneously the unreality and the withdrawnness of the visible.

Four years after his extensive exhibition in the Kunsthaus Bregenz, Kogler will now develop a wide-ranging parcours for the Kunstverein Hannover, which will, for the most part, be made up of new works. The presentation, which will be accompanied by comprehensive catalog published by HatjeCantz Verlag documenting, aside from the exhibition items, all of Kogler's works made since the 1980s, will move to the Taxispalais in Innsbruck.

LENI HOFFMANN beautiful one day — perfect the next

munka, 2004 Courtesy: Kunstverein Hannover, Foto: Manuel Franke

21. February - 11.April 2004

For about decade, Leni Hoffmann (born 1962), who lives and works in Düsseldorf, has been following a highly complex and aesthetically convincing pictorial concept. Her consistently innovative und surprising variations explore that prolific boundary between painting and sculpture, between space and surface.

Her kneaded geometrical surfaces, the wood and plaster blocks that jut out at right angles from the wall, as well as the aggressive color scheme and sensuous surfaces of her materials serve to make the surrounding architecture more dynamic: A multifaceted compositional intertwining of colors and forms is created, which neither the space nor the viewer can resist. The rectangular wooden block integrated into the floor covering, the geometric pattern of the glass wall, the lopsided polished floor and the dominating staircase are among the elements used by the artist in works that extend into existing space.
In the aftermath of exhibitions by David Reed (2002) and Luc Tuymans (2003), the Kunstverein Hannover is offering yet another central contribution to the current discussion of contemporary painting. In addition, the show in the Kunstverein Hannover is the first comprehensive presentation of Hoffmanns works since 1999 and it is also her first large solo exhibition in Germany.

kunstverein hannover • sophienstraße 2 • 30159 hannover • germany • tel +49 (0) 511 16 99 278-0 • fax +49 (0) 511 16 99 278-278 mail@kunstverein-hannover.de • www.kunstverein-hannover.de opening hours: tuesday–saturday 12 noon–7 pm • sunday+holiday 11 am–7 pm admission: 5 € • reduced 3 € • members free Impressum