DUE TO
01.05 — 27.06 2020
NADINE FECHT, PETER FREITAG, SAMMLUNG VON FOERSTER, PIERRE GRANOUX, FILIP MARKIEWICZ, BEATRIZ MORALES, FRANÇOIS MORELLET, MATTHIAS REINMUTH, FIETE STOLTE, TIES TEN BOSCH, MARIANNE THOERMER, LAWRENCE WEINER, …
Curated by
PIERRE GRANOUX & WAYRA SCHÜBEL
DUE TO the limited number of visitors at a time, we friendly ask you to make an appointment. Please e-mail us: off-space@lage-egal.net
We are looking forward to welcoming you!
LAGE EGAL [GW34/35]
Greifswalder Str 35 • 10405 Berlin
+49 173-1807226 • off-space@lage-egal.net
Thursday and Friday, 3-6pm & Sat, 12-3pm • By appointment only!
| DE
Das Ausstellungsvorhaben DUE TO versteht sich als ein Rückblick auf die letzten zehn Jahre künstlerischer und kuratorischer Tätigkeit, in denen Künstler und ihre Werke einen unverrückbaren Platz in der Geschichte von LAGE EGAL eingenommen haben.
Aber wie kann eine Jubiläumsausstellung während des, wenn auch gelockerten, Shutdowns eröffnet werden, als ob in den letzten beiden Monaten nichts passiert wäre? Als ob die Wiederaufnahme der Geschehnisse ohne Feingefühl für etwaige Folgen möglich wäre. Welchen Sinn ergäbe das?
Ausgehend von der Fibonacci-Folge (0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34…) ist der Ausgangspunkt der Ausstellungskonzeption null, die Ausstellung DUE TO entwickelt sich somit proportional exponentiell und ist am 01. Mai 2020 still und leise, ohne Kunst noch Gäste, eröffnet worden. Die Fibonacci-Reihe ist auf die eine oder andere Weise in fast allem enthalten, in der Natur und in den Konstruktionen der Menschen, und mit ein bisschen Magie könnte man gar behaupten, diese Zahlenfolge sei die Brücke, die Natürliches und Künstliches, Entstandenes und Geschaffenes verbindet.
Die Ausstellung ist ein fortlaufender Prozess, und im Laufe der kommenden Wochen werden neue Werke hinzu kommen, die das aktuelle Gesamtgefüge verdichten.
Die Schließung des Kulturbetriebs hat viele Fragen aufgeworfen und Unsicherheiten geschaffen. Als Antwort darauf baut DUE TO die Ausstellung ohne die herkömmlichen Interaktionen auf. Wer empfängt, wer erschafft? Wer ist ein Verbündeter, und was ist der Feind? Und wenn ja, warum?
Um mit möglichen Antworten zu spielen, sind alle eingeladen, diesen lebhaften, laufenden Prozess mit uns weiter voran zu treiben.
| EN
The exhibition project DUE TO intends to be an introspection of the last ten years of artistic and curatorial activity, in which artists and their works have gained an immovable place in LAGE EGAL’s history.
However, how to open a 10th anniversary exhibition during the lock down as if nothing had happened in the past two months? As if activity could be re-started without sensitivity for possible consequences of the recent incidents. What sense does that make?
Based on the famous Fibonacci Sequence (0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34…) the point of departure is Zero, the idea of the exhibition is developing itself in proportional exponentially. In one way or another, the Fibonacci series is found in almost everything, in nature and in human constructions, and with a pinch of magic one could even say that this sequence of numbers is the bridge that connects the natural and the artificial, the originated and the constructed.
The exhibition is an ongoing process, and in the course of the coming weeks new works will be added that will condense the current overall structure.
The shutdown of the cultural industry has raised many questions and created uncertainties. In response to this, DUE TO builds up the exhibit without the presumed interactions. Who hosts, who ghosts? Who is an ally, and what is the enemy? And if so, why?
To play with possible answers, everyone is invited to continue this sprightly ongoing process with us.
THE ARTISTS
Nadine Fecht
The work chosen for DUE TO is from her work on paper series mimikry (Selbstkritik), but installed as a unique wall installation. The words are all taken from within the context of disciplining, set in vinyl letters and the added handwriting, in DUE TO’s case it’s hand-spraying, become the element of resistance in this series. MIMIKRY references the anti-Hitler and anti-war-graffiti in Nazi Germany. MIMIKRY derives from the Greek term mimetikos, the verbal adjective of mimeisthai, “to imitate”. In DUE TO’s concept this refers to signs and numbers as symbols of explanation of complex information, as MIMIKRY of today’s truth.
Peter Freitag
To precisely define Peter Freitag (*1972) as an artist, you can say he is a digital-analogue picture sculpteur. In his works he manipulates the beautiful appearance of media images by defacing the auspicious surfaces of their pictorial surroundings and furnishing them with outstanding levels of interpretation. His interferences disrupt the originally linear and unmistakable intention and function of the advertising images and thus open up new spaces of association.
The raw material for this photo-based series of collage works are full-page ads in fashion and art magazines. The title of this series, “shocked, I had no idea that this world existed!”, is itself extracted from a magazine-article and illustrates the related visual experience.
Pierre Granoux
The exhibition space LAGE EGAL was founded 10 years ago by French artist, and artist-curator Pierre Granoux. He unpacked this installation with a spin move entitled “Magic Dürer” and dunked it into DUE TO, a reminiscence to Magic Johnson and Dürer’s magic square, which is an enigmatic detail from his 1514 engraving “Melencolia”, in which the sum 34 can be found in the rows, columns, diagonals, each of the quadrants, the center four squares, the corner squares, the four outer numbers clockwise from the corners.
Pierre Granoux (*1963, Gap, France) focus is curating a space to exhibit art. His artistic background is conceptual art by investigating language on a meta-level. With the use of appropriated materials and situations which are borrowed from a day-to-day context, he presents everyday allusions as references to texts, painting and art history. He currently lives and works in Berlin.
Filip Markiewicz
is a musician and multidisciplinary artist who expresses himself through a range of different media that includes drawing, video and installation. Markiewicz represented the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg at the Venice Biennale 2015 with his project “Paradiso Lussemburgo”. The debate of everyday issues, political agendas, and the many consequences of capitalist society are at the core of his artistic research. With his multidisciplinary practice, Markiewicz invites the viewer to reflect on the paradoxes of a Europe facing a severe existential crisis. His willingness to go back to the pencil and the paper emerges from the need to use drawing as a widespread technique of expression that leaves a “real” imprint in a digitalized world.
Beatriz Morales
Her works from her “Ruin Porn” series are engaged in revealing the unseen: The concept of Ruin Porn is commonly used in the field of photography to document the decay of architecture. Whether through natural disasters, building ruins or insolvencies, buildings are robbed of their original function and exist only as void shells.
Born 1981 and raised in Mexico City, Beatriz Morales lives and works in Berlin. She developed her skills auto-didactically and has been exhibiting her work internationally from Beirut, Paris, Berlin, Dallas to Mexico, where she is having a big institutional solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art MACAY. In her work, Morales combines an abstract expressionist approach with figurative and illustrative components, as well as a strong dimension of research into color relationships and materiality.
François Morellet
The curators went to all lengths to involve François Morellet as being a part of the exhibition and we are very pleased to show the fantastic works “Pi grisé” (2002) and “0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13” (1978). François Morellet was very fond of the infinite number Pi, which he used in many different ways to construct his works. In this screen print, Morellet has attributed to each number a different grey tone. From bottom to top, following Pi’s number (3.141592653…), the grey lines appear like a greys symphony, the order of colors being dictated by Pi. Pi being infinite, the lines stretch to the very top of the sheet.
In his oeuvre from 1978 it’s all about dots that are arranged in lines: Between point 1 and point 2 there is a distance of 1. Between point 2 and point 3 there is a distance of 2. Between point 3 and point 4 there is a distance of 3 … and so on… sheet after sheet, the lines get bigger and bigger until the full height of the sheet is reached. The point arrangement system remains the same.
Born in 1926 in Cholet (France), François Morellet lived and worked there until he passed away in May 2016. He has devoted most of his career to the radical exploration of geometric abstraction. A founding member in 1960 of the Visual Art Research Group (GRAV), he has multiplied the types of visual intervention, from painting on frames to projects in the city’s architecture called “Disintegrations’. What determines Morellet’s approach is the play with frames, the development of many systems, the irony brought by the titles and the use of the random within pre-established principles.
Matthias Reinmuth
In his latest series entitled “Glimpse”, Matthias Reinmuth depicts emotional landscapes reflecting the constant flow of sounds and images conveyed by the media and social networks that interfere in our daily lives. Matthias Reinmuth (*1974), former student of Georg Baselitz, currently lives in Berlin just finished extensive artistic research in Los Angeles and East Asia.
As we were talking about the concept of DUE TO he replied: “The question about the 0 and 1 came up spontaneously in our short phone conversation when you explained the Fibonacci sequence to me. My short theory about this in relation to the Glimpse paintings is that every digital storage medium, every pixel is based on the electronic decision of on or off. On a memory chip the electricity is directed to the left with ‘on’ and to the right with ‘off’, to put it simply. So every pixel is 0 or 1, and if it should be colored then perhaps 00110 for red, who knows. In the sequence of the many pixels, a digital image is a sequence of ones and zeros, many digital images are a noise and the glimpse is the background noise of our time, so pure on or off and an infinitely painted sequence of ones and zeros.”
Fiete Stolte
An exhibition concept intrigued by numbers led us directly to ask Fiete Stolte for a contribution and we are very happy to have “Facing the sun at High Noon” (2009) on display. In this work, Berlin-based artist Fiete Stolte (*1979) restructures the division of time for himself, living by an eight-day week and twenty-one hour day for the purpose of dissolving the “dictates of schedules in an atmosphere of imagination,” as the artist himself states.
In “Facing the Sun at High Noon” he spent a week photographing the sun at noon from his window. Since his new time system makes the time of day shift successively by three hours, Stolte’s “high noon” might occur in the early evening or at the darkest hour of the night. Time removed from its external clock hands becomes an act of consciousness … and a variation to this experience we were all having in the last months.
Ties Ten Bosch
Artist Ties Ten Bosch (NL, 1977) lives and works in Berlin, and besides his career as an individual visual artist he has been involved in several artistic collaborations such as Volksrekorders, hOUTSKOOL (an analog art-zine), the B.a.d-foundation in Rotterdam amongst others
“What is usually scribbled in the back of an artwork, with hardly any second thought, the artist’s signature and edition number is the work in Ties Ten Bosch’s “Initial numbers” neon series. Ten Bosch takes his initials – TTB – and reproduces his signature as neon sculptures numbered 1/5-5/5. What seems like a clever play on words is a sly commentary on the art market’s (mis)placed value on the artist’s name. The artist’s multiple is taken to it’s logical conclusion: the artist, himself, is editioned. The image and content of the work are the neon signatures, rendered in pleasing color and light. The artists name is thus materialized, commodied and expected to act and circulate as a product, a brand of its own.” (Eriola Pira, curator)
Marianne Thoermer
The artist proposed to make an in-situ installation for DUE TO. Thoermer creates effervescent monotypes, ceramics, paintings and large-scale installations rooted in a 1970s knotting technique. The forms of Thoermer’s extraordinary works are a confluence of the automatic (her sinewy, loose defining of each work’s shape and form), and the deliberate (her incredibly labour-intensive textile application and chemistry-kit experimentation with wax, foam and other materials).
German artist and Royal Academy of Arts School graduate Marianne Thoermer boldly blends traditional techniques of composition and unconventional materials. She was born in 1987, Halle, Germany, and studied at the Berlin Weissensee School of Art, Germany and Chelsea College of Art and Design, London, and she graduated from the Royal Academy of Arts in 2018.
She has been the recipient of several major awards in the UK and Germany, including the 2010 Konrad-Adenauer Foundation award (Berlin) and the E Vincent Harris Award & Andre Dunoyer de Segonzac Award (both London, in 2017 & 18 respectively).
Sammlung von Förster
A spontaneous artwork initiated by art collector Holm Friebe (aka Berlin-based Sammlung von Foerster) was spontaneously added in the exhibition DUE TO. The artwork is going to be supplemented by a performative intervention.
„Work is a piece of transactional art and is called as it says. One of the young workers from the delivery shop next door to the gallery. I offered 50€, Christian (young delivery worker) said 100. We settled on 80. He originally paid 60. It’s from some Insta hip-hop label. (@ceomillionaires) You name it. End of story.“
THE CURATORS
It doesn’t matter what you create
if you have no fun
∼ from the song Party Girl by Michelle Gurevich
LAGE EGAL — Pierre Granoux
Is it a studio? Is it a gallery? No, it’s LAGE EGAL, founded by Pierre Granoux in 2010. The French artist moved to Germany at the turn of the millennium, works as an artist-curator mainly in Berlin, currently as guest-lecturer at UdK, is often to be found at book fairs of independent specialist publishers and sometimes museums invite him to lecture as Duchamps expert.
The stages of LAGE EGAL’s activities fluctuate in flux, and it’s state of the art cannot be pigeonholed. What can be taken for sure is that this exhibition place is a good host and proverbially opens unsuspected doorways to offer artists a playground for their artwork – whereby the viewings are in themselves an inseparable part of artistic production, philosophical exploration and social immersion.
The place around the Bötzowkiez is the starting point for a nimble networking that reaches far beyond the neighbourhood itself. LAGE EGAL manages to elevate the numerous changing public spheres of art to the status of a programme – and thus to become a symbol of the post-contemporary.
Pierre Granoux invited Wayra Schübel to co-curate the anniversary show together with him. Her academic background is a M.A. degree in Chinese and Cultural Studies, her cultural foreground is eclectic, born in Western Germany, grew up in South America, and socialized in East Germany after the reunification. From time to time she starts campaigns to empower the Berlin art scene as a wholesome ground, like “Kunst braucht Raum” with AKKU – Aktionsgruppe Bildender Künstler:innen, and #UnitedWeShare with Artists Care About Bridges. She ran art spaces for five years (2012-2017) in Berlin – LSD Gallery and b2_ Galerie Leipzig before she started focusing on Art Communication. She supported PR and event management of the 9th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art (2016), and has been in charge as PR Manager for three pavilions at the 56th Venice Biennale (2015). Since 2016 she is online editor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Leipzig.
