HANNES
BROECKER • BURGHARD • TARJE EIKANGER GULLAKSEN • DARRI LORENZEN • WIEBKE ELZEL
& JANA MÜLLER • REGINE MÜLLER-WALDECK • IVAN SEAL • MARKUS WEISBECK
Opening: June 25, 2010, 6-9 pm
•
"KMA Group
Show" is the first group exhibition at Krome Gallery giving a selective
insight into the ongoing development process of the gallery's program after
almost one year of regular exhibitions. Three of the altogether seven positions
have already had solo exhibitions at Krome Gallery in the past while four of
them have been especially invited to participate in the "KMA Group
Show". Almost all of the works on view are installation-based and thereby
comprise a wide range of media from sculpture to photography, painting, sound
and graphic design.
The abbreviation
"KMA" within the exhibition title stands for the venue's site,
Karl-Marx-Allee, in whose architecture the gallery is strongly embedded. The
works selected for the exhibition can be linked on different levels to the
historical, political and aesthetical implications of the boulevard which had a
highly representational function during the GDR. In this sense the exhibition title's
seemingly neutral part "Group Show" points to the issue of collective
representation and its boundaries, whether referring to exhibition discourses,
gallery programs, political ideas or joint interests in general. The
exhibition's logo, in turn derives from a campaign for an art, design and
gastronomy flyer initiated in 2009, which was meant to represent about 20
participants located alongside Karl-Marx-Allee. In the end, however, it has not
been produced in that form.
1 •••
Leipzig and Berlin
based artist Regine Müller-Waldeck (*1975) constructs her objects and
installations mostly from scanty materials and sees them as 'psycho-social
landscapes' whose associative potential she mobilises to create awareness of
the contingency of socially protective and supportive
constructions and to make them experience-able. In "Separation /
Wehr" (Separation / Defence)
the viewer passes through a fragile collective of unstitched pleated
skirts which evoke an image of corrugated iron of the kind that afford scant
shelter to slum dwellers.
Simultaneously the
dark plissé stands in its stringent form and harsh materiality for a militarily
uniform disciplining of the body and conditioning of the subject. Until 2008,
Regine Müller-Waldeck was studying under Astrid Klein and Timm Rautert at the
HGB Leipzig. She received several grants, among them being the Cultural
Foundation Saxony, which afforded her a stay at the ISCP in New York. She had
her first solo exhibition in 2006 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Leipzig, where
she received an art prize presented by Dresdner Bank in 2008. Her exhibition at
Kunsthalle Mannheim won her a nomination for the Hector Award for Emerging
Artists. After showing at Temporäre Kunsthalle, she will have her next solo
exhibition in Berlin at Klemm's Gallery this fall.
2 •••
Internationally
renowned with Surface, his agency for corporate cultural design, German graphic
designer Markus Weisbeck (*1965) had his first exhibition with freely created
works last year at Krome Gallery. The work "IBKDL" (I am not a
democratic country) is deliberately shown once again in "KMA Group
Show". While visually referring to the aesthetics of the late 1980s the
image’s polemic statement points ironically to the generic mechanisms of a
group exhibition, a gallery program, an art district or a social structure and
its aesthetical represantations.
3 •••
The English artist
Ivan Seal (*1973) creates site-specific installations combining painting and
sound. For "KMA Group
Show" he has compiled an ensemble of small format paintings and a computer
generated sound piece reminiscent of dadaist
techniques. For the past year Seal has been creating a continuously growing
volume of small to middle format oil paintings in a naturalistic manner
depicting recurring motifs against undefined spaces. We see amorphous cubes and
cuboids seemingly made of clay, held, connected or pinched with strings, placed
on plinths, studded with matches, nails or cigarette stubs that Seal examines
in trompe-l'œil fashion. Both the automated sounds of fragmented speech and the
paintings, where spaces and objects are loosely interlinked beyond their
margins, point to an oneiric realm between the fictive and the real space. Ivan
Seal has been living in Berlin since 2004 where he has had several exhibitions
and performances, at Julius Werner Galerie amongst others. Parallel to a show
by Manfred Pernice Ivan Seal’s exhibition "I learn by osmosis" is
currently on view at CEAAC Strasbourg.
4 •••
Wiebke Elzel and Jana
Müller (both *1977) already started an intense collaboration in 2001 while
studying photography at HGB Leipzig. This led to large-staged photographs
alluding to social catastrophies and collective fears as subject matter.
Analogously, they create photographic series that document urban, geographical
and geopolitical processes of dissolution. The exhibited series "Land
II", also shows this by depicting abandoned and deserted, and
partly-drowned islands from the lagoon of Venice. A map is printed on each
photograph’s back side indicating the respective island by its name and position
with a stamp. Wiebke Elzel and Jana Müller are currently living in Leipzig and
Berlin. Their conjoint works was lastly shown at Kunsthalle Rostock and
Fotogalerie Wien. Their individual oeuvres have been presented at Schütte
Gallery, Essen, where Wiebke Elzel’s solo exhibition "For the Birds"
is currently on view.
5 •••
Hannes Broecker
(*1980), participant of this year’s sponsorship programme "New
Positions" at the Art Cologne, devotes himself to the iconography, the
systems and structures of public, and predominantly urban space. He transfers
fragments and abstractions from street, sub- and pop-culture into his works of
art, which include sculptures, assemblages and installations. He has been
working on this project since the start of his study of the
"interdisciplinary and experimenta painting" at an art academy in
Dresden. Hannes Broecker is represented by Baer Gallery, Dresden.
6 •••
BURGHARD signifies the
Berlin based artist couple , Romy
and Stef Richter (*1977, *1971) ,
who have been collaborating since 2002. With their objects,
installations and collages that often consist of found material, BURGHARD creates poetic situations
through simple inversions. By doing so,
they raise questions of architectural, linguistic and iconographic
matter, which sometimes even leads
to the (seemingly) disappearance of the work itself. In this sense, the installation of seven used mirrors
under the gallery’s ceiling is a gesture of invisibility and refusal. The
original purpose of the mirrors is refused and instead their differently
colored back sides face the viewers.
In ist simplicity the work is visually comprehensible, however it creates an abstract space above the
mirrors. Romy Richter studied product design in Dresden and typography in
Berlin. Stef Richter studied art in Dresden and in the class of Heimo Zobernig
in Vienna. Apart from contributions at group exhibitions (at Kunstverein
Bregenz and Manifesta 7 a.o.), their last solo exhibitions were held at
Kunstverein Arnsberg and at the Communal Gallery of Wolfsburg.
7 •••
Tarje Eikanger
Gullaksen was born 1973 in Norway and moved to Berlin after his studies in fine
arts and art theory at The Royal Danish Art Academy, Copenhagen in 2005. Taking
an investigative, research-based approach, Tarje Eikanger Gullaksen works with
a wide range of media, such as text, installation, sculpture, and drawing.
Since 2009 he has
devoted himself to film projects, which led to "Unfinished Symphony,"
a filmic portrait, about the laboratory of the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst
Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957), that has been presented at Krome Gallery this year.
At the moment, Gullaksen is doing a post production of the film, for which he
had received working grant in China recently. In "KMA Group Show,"
one of his few 'paintings' is presented as a paint page of Walter Benjamin’s
"Arcades". Benjamin, in turn, quotes a long section from
"Eternity through the Stars" a text by the French revolutionary and
early socialist Louis-Auguste Blanqui (1805-1881).
8 •••
Icelandic artist Darri
Lorenzen (*1978) makes site-specific space installations that sometimes take
over the whole place. He
applies media like sound, light, architectural objects, computer simulation or
photography.
Basically, he aims to
develop performative models and strategies for a sensible experience of space,
time, and body. As in Lorenzen’s exhibition "In Point of Fact"
at the Krome Gallery last year, the viewer becomes part of the work itself in
"KMA Group Show", too. He realized a number of performing projects
while still studying at the art academy in Reykjavik
and the Interfaculty Image & Sound of the academy in Den Haag before moving
to Berlin in 2005. Darri Lorenzen gained several grants from the Center for
Icelandic Art, Reykjavík, as well as the Dungal Art Prize in 2007. He is
represented in the collection of Thyssen-Bornemisza, Vienna, and in a couple of
publications, such as "Younger than Jesus: Artist Directory" (Phaidon
Press, 2009) and "Icelandic Art Today" (Hatje Cantz, 2009).