Jörg Immendorf 14. 06. 1945 - 27.5.2007

http://www.zdf.de/ZDFmediathek/inhalt/8/0,4070,5544328-5,00.html

Norbert Witzgall

Norbert Witzgall

“Cameron”

“There are different sources of pictorial motivation in my life. One is my protestant farmer childhood background where I was told to keep away from admiring pictures of a popular nature; I thus developed a secret addiction to pictures so images I had been looking at initiated my “socialization”.

The first source of imagery came in the form of countless photographs from the family albums and the stories attached to them. With the myths that were cast upon them, they seemed to represent, in these half-truths, class and role models that constructed identity – that of the portrayed as well as that of the beholder. These role models loomed in all the other photographic images that caught my attention in childhood: in advertising campaigns, TV-series and the (American) cinema, the pop culture cosmos.

The ghostlike and immaterial clichés of photography are still the main source for the images I try to reproduce. These pictures always show bodies and moments that passed a long time ago. The desire to reach the unreachable, the past, becomes greater in proportion to the impossibility of doing so. To lose myself in a time and place that doesn’t exist anymore, or never existed the way it is depicted, attracts me.

By working with these beautiful shadows I try to get rid of them.
I could describe my process as a form of exorcism.
The precise moment of wiping out these images is the reason why I paint.
Covering and hiding, canceling the primary image is also a way to address my constant doubt in relation to painting, its validity as a contemporary artistic medium. The first stage entails painting the „ideal“ picture: here I try to stick to a stiff academism. The use of stale bourgeois techniques, such as oil glazes or soft pastels, really interests me- in their obsoleteness they implicate a slight irony and maybe a certain feeling of vengeance. (Norbert Witzgall)

~

With pressed flowers, ribbons, broken tiles, dust, incisions on the canvas or board, Norbert Witzgall brings a new inflection to “realist painting”- he reincarnates nineteenth century academic painting, Hollywood head-shots, photographs of lovers, family members, artist friends in his paintings with a dandyish flair and an attitude that is at once iconolatric and iconoclastic. The whimsical addition of elements on the surface of the works -and conversely the subtraction when it comes to slashes or faceless bodies- never compromises the intensity of his representations but it nods half-mischievously half-seriously to a tradition that looms large, dies and is reborn every few seasons.

There is a kinship to early 20th century attitudes of satire and insolence that could be situated at the cusp of Dada and Surrealism (Jean Arp’s reliefs and works on paper, Max Ernst’s frottages and collages, Francis Picabia’s “Transparences”) but also to Joseph Cornell’s’ nostalgic, Victorian bric-a-brac assemblages as Witzgall often incorporates objects found in thrift stores in his art works.

For his first solo exhibition with Nice & Fit we are presenting a new body of work that includes paintings on canvas and board, works on paper and assemblages. The title of the exhibition sets sonic associations: from his deep interest in photography (by referencing British photographer Julia Margaret Cameron) to the nostalgic carelessness of John Hughes’ 1986 teenage movie “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” (via a character named “Cameron”) and the bi-gender nature of the name. Finally, like the titles of his works that often refer directly to the individuals portrayed, (“Lauren”, “Nadja”, “Jan”, “Elvis”) the choice of one name suggests that the entire show is approached as a single portrait, perhaps of the artist himself.

Angela Bulloch

ESTHER SCHIPPER
Linienstrasse 85
April 27–June 23


Upon entering this exhibition, one’s attention is immediately captured by a large, luminous balloon hovering in the darkened gallery. A slightly off-kilter image of the Southern Hemisphere, taken from outer space, is projected onto it. When the projection temporarily expires, a yellowish light arises from the back of the hanging sphere. Loudspeakers diffuse a considerably slowed and altered 1973 jazz version of Richard Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra. As always in Bulloch’s installations, sound, light, and image are meticulously intertwined; here the sound track (coordinated with the programming of the lights) runs for exactly 36:07 and is followed by a silence of identical length, while the projection is on a one-hour loop, making the film run increasingly out of sync. In addition, Bulloch has arranged a grid of twelve prints, each framing (in the exact dimensions of the artist’s famous “pixel boxes”) a view of the universe from Mercury as generated by a computer program; apart from Earth, all celestial bodies have been rendered as colored dots (again reminiscent of the pixel boxes’ abstraction). The same virtual map has been used as the source for a computer-controlled LED installation that turns the ceiling of an adjacent room into another decentered perspective on the Blue Planet from outer space. This new body of work, while maintaining Bulloch’s signature high production values, departs from her prior investigation of the intersection of Minimalism and corporate design and instead creates a spectacular allegory of globalization. By means of a technologically elaborate, phenomenologically complex setting, literal worldviews—and their respective, ideologically charged modes of representation, such as astronomy—are at the center of the artist’s continued observation of systems governing human self-perception.

—André Rottman

Peter Zwaan

For years now Peter Zwaan is working like a mad professor in his studio in The Hague, Holland.
Reshaping the world, questioning our view on nature and the world surrounding us.
His work has an obvious link to artists like Ron Mueck in it´s fabulous techniques but Zwaan´s world is a complete different one from the more biografical works of Mueck.
Zwaan questions the way we look at animals in our world, do we see them as creatures living on this globe with the same rights as us humans or are they merely creatures that have to obey our every wish and still our endless needs.
Human arrogance is a topic of high importance in his work.

all works: polyester, polyurethaan, acryl, hair

Lucas Lenglet in Berlin

Berlin Amsterdam Folded or tilted reality´s

Works by Tjebbe Beekman

Arjan van Helmond

2 new shows at: http://www.ljongma.dds.nl/galerie/current.html
http://www.faprojects.com/artists/

Sebastian Gögel - The new hot thing from Leipzig

In Sebastian Göel´s (*1978 Thuringia, Germany) artworks, the world takes on the appearance of a confusing place full of permanent contradictions and conflicts. His particular artistic approach consists of portraying everywhere in his pictures subterranean traps, hiding-places and secrets, as well as fissures and hidden backgrounds, and of turning all dimensions topsy-turvy. A gloomy world is opened to view and shown to be inhabited by hermaphroditic beings situated somewhere between humans and animals, between both known and unknown stages of an ongoing evolution.

The views presented by Gögel invert reality into its opposite: inner worlds are turned inside out, the skin is stripped away from bodies to reveal their fleshy and formless substance, extremities are twisted and elongated, heads are inflated, eyes shifted and noses stretched excessively. The spaces are confusing pitfalls in which may be found every imaginable fear and tension. Gögel creates an exaggerated pandemonium in which all sorts of inscrutable and incomprehensible fantasies attain their artistic form. He plays a game of distortion and mirroring right up to its very limits: in many of his pictures, the artist continuously multiplies various meanings and statements.

This excessive degree of energy and expressiveness is offset again and again by works whose sobriety and purity stand in contrast to the grand pastose gesture, and in which G�gel depicts a spectrum of strained exertion on both the individual and social level, inasmuch he causes the protagonists to grow rigid within a strict hierarchy and a self-imposed discipline. He repeatedly paints and draws the embittered and contorted physiognomies of various personalities. These figures give expression to a degenerated social world in which everyone attempts to see through, to assess and to deceive everyone else. Beneath the sign of spurious respect and feigned interest, all esteem for others is surreptitiously discarded, and one�s own advantage is single-mindedly sought after.

New Show Ronald de Bloeme

Now in The Hague, The Netherlands!!
http://www.nouvellesimages.nl/

More info about Ronald de Bloeme:http://www.spielhaus-morrison.com/galerie/start.htm

Exhibition Art Amsterdam

‘Berlin – Amsterdam’ of the Rijksakademie
Each year Art Amsterdam makes space for a surprising exposition at the heart of the exhibition.This year the honour goes to the Rijksakademie, which is showing the work of ex-participants who are presently working in Berlin, including Tjebbe Beekman, Mathilde ter Heijne, Alexandra Leykauf, Mathilde Rosier, Bojan Šarčević and Marike Schuurman.The presentation consists of paintings, drawings, installations, video and photographs chosen by the Berlin-based Erika Hoffmann, a top German collector.

New Website Marike Schuurman

http://www.marikeschuurman.com/

Limbus

New Work for Art Amsterdam Tjebbe Beekman

De beangstigende schoonheid van Tuymans

di 24/04/07

- Eigenlijk hoeft Luc Tuymans geen introductie meer. Hij is gewoonweg een van onze beste kunstenaars. Een presentatie van nieuw werk is dan ook een echt evenement. De expo is getitteld "Les revenants", letterlijk vertaald "zij die terugkomen", maar ook "spoken".
"Les revenants" verwijst naar het boek van de Franse historicus Jean Lacouture "Les jésuites".

Het eerste deel heet "Les conquérants" en beschrijft de veroveringen die zij onder het mom van het christendom en de beschaving uitvoerden.

Het tweede deel heet “Les revenants” en wijst op het feit dat de macht en de invloed van de jezuïeten nog altijd aanwezig is, zij zijn terug van nooit weg geweest.

In het woordenboek staat er bij jezuïet ook: sluw. Deze religieuze orde spreekt al jaren tot onze verbeelding door een sfeer van geheimzinnigheid en ambiguïteit.

Boze tongen gewagen zelfs van een soort loge. Het is een orde die zich aan de ene kant als humanistisch voordoet en zich beroept op het concept van de vrije wil, maar aan de andere kant blijft zitten in een star conservatisme.

De bekendste en waarschijnlijk meest omstreden activiteit van de jezuïeten is het opzetten van een netwerk van hoog kwaliteitsonderwijs.
De macht van een christelijke orde
Tuymans is geïntrigeerd door de grote impact die een jezuïetenopvoeding op het verdere leven van hun leerlingen heeft en door het feit dat een klein land als België in de greep is van een kleine elite met diezelfde opleiding.

Tuymans wil opnieuw de aandacht vestigen op de machtige jezuïeten, die terug van nooit weggeweest zijn.

“Les revenants” kadert perfect in zijn zoektocht naar het begrip macht: hij schilderde eerder de “heimat” van rechts Vlaanderen, het Belgische koloniale verleden, de terreur van het nazi-regime.

Momenteel werkt Tuymans aan een reeks over “Disneyworld”, waarin hij de macht van publiciteit en de media aan de kaak stelt.
Van miniatuur tot monumentaal werk
De expo begint met kleine, monochrome aquarellen. Het zijn vignetten die zich inspireren op de geestelijke oefeningen van Ignatius van Loyola, de stichter van de orde.

Het zijn meditaties over de zeven hoofdzonden. De schilderijen hebben grote afmetingen, met schaalvergrotingen die een overweldigende indruk maken.

De doeken ogen als een immense overbelichte foto, waarop de kleuren uitgevlakt of verhevigd zijn.

Als Tuymans het barokinterieur van een Italiaanse kerk schildert, beeldt hij die kerk af als een opengeslagen boek: de bladzijden bollen op en de vouw loopt als een barst dwars door het beeld.
"Rome" straks naar Amsterdam
“Rome” is een monumentaal schilderij van 2,3 bij 3,1 meter van het al even monumentale interieur van het Sint-Pietersbasiliek. Het gebouw is verpletterend en de aanwezige gelovige mensenmassa wordt herleid tot kleine, ongedefinieerde vlekjes.

Dit prachtige schilderij werd al aangekocht door het Stedelijke Museum van Amsterdam. Op “The deal” schudden de paus en de generaal-overste van de jezuïeten elkaar de hand na een hevige polemiek over Latijns-Amerika en pedofilie.

De schilderijen van Luc Tuymans zijn van een beangstigende schoonheid, waar er altijd een onderhuidse spanning zindert.

Die “unheimliche” sfeer is de weergave van de stille terreur die de jezuïeten nog altijd uitoefenen. Want Tuymans schildert intelligent, en sluw…als een jezuïet.
Claude Blondeel