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In the exhibition FADING BEAUTY, we are showing the impressive flower photographs of the renowned fashion and portrait photographer Dale Grant, who comes from the Bahamas and lives in Berlin and Rotterdam.
Dale Grant has embarked on a unique artistic journey to capture the beauty in decay. For him, flowers represent a profound allegory of life. The artist sees flowers not only as colourful creatures, but also as a symbol of the cycle of life – from youth to wilting, from radiance to transience.
In the exhibition “FADING BEAUTY”, Dale Grant reveals the true and unique beauty of flowers as they begin to wither. The petals unfold completely and their vibrant colours become more muted until they finally become transparent and fragile. The incoming light penetrates the petals, giving the photographs a mesmerising texture and form.
The artist began photographing flowers a few years ago in New York, simply out of a desire to explore something new. He not only photographed fresh cut flowers, but also those that were at the end of their life cycle. Through this experience, Dale Grant discovered the beauty in the falling petals that fell to the ground, and he recognised in them a reflection of life and death as it is also found in our own existence.
Dale Grant’s approach to flower portraits is similar to his approach to human portraits. He studies his models carefully before shooting them and considers the cycle of life as a fascinating motif. In his eyes, ageing represents a form of beauty that he discovers in all its facets, even in the most wrinkled faces.
The photo book “Fading Beauty”, which was published in summer 2019, reflects this fascination and is dedicated to the beauty that slowly fades over time. The “FADING BEAUTY” exhibition at the nüüd.berlin gallery offers visitors the opportunity to experience Dale Grant’s unique perspective on the transience and beauty of life.
It is dark. We need to find a way out, to get a clue how to use these stupid daily objects surrounding us, or at least how to avoid the stink of all these frailing flowers. Certain dangers are involved, some spooky creatures hiding in the corners. Stress holes up and somehow also pleasure. Was Rapunzel the first escape room player? She found the answer in her body. One should learn from her.
Can someone really escape this room? Past experience proves otherwise. Whatever awaits outside is not that different after all. Fear of violence is everywhere. We are stuck in a limbo, this eerie non-place between desire and regret. The body is lying down, sometimes supine, sometimes lateral. The soul is leaving it, taking a quick turn over all that it has been through, just before it decides where to go.
Something here is cheesy, yet seductive, stimulating blood veins, arousing the body, twisting it, dehumanizing it. Is it a horror movie or a rom-com? It’s as if a drunk film editor enjoyed the freedom to follow her childish urges. She was cutting and pasting brutally, sometimes in a whimsical manner, often with great anger. Like a butcher with an Andalusian dog barking around the slaughterhouse, slashing the flesh and sewing it with meat. The painting became an event, and the event is tonight. Do not miss it. Do not miss them — longing is a very long process. Like a shoelace knot, impossible to undo.
The blue sky is full of stars (and zeppelins). Which one of them represents death? Is it the big bear, the small pot or that annoying black cat that returns to our bed again and again? What does it have to announce? Some superstitions suggest spitting when it crosses our path. They also suggest not breaking mirrors and to avoid tucking thumbs inside of a cemetery. We might be in trouble. Are we doomed to burn down in hell or to burn out at work? Obsessive thoughts can carve a hole in the wall. The queen is dead, long live the queen! She must be dethroned though from her very dramatic crown. After all, we want to rest in peace, in one piece, at least for eight hours a night.
Noam Alon
with Alicja Kwade, Anselm Reyle, Andrea Pichl, Antje Blumenstein, Axel Geis, Berta Fischer, Bernhard Martin, Christian Jankowski, Dirk Bell, Erik Schmidt, Frank Nitsche, Gregor Hildebrandt, Hansa Wisskirchen, Henning Straßburger, Isa Melsheimer, Lars Teichmann, Lisa Junghanß, Lothar Hempel, Manfred Peckl, Olivia Berckemeyer, Oska Gutheil, Peter Welz, Philip Grözinger, Saâdane Afif, Stephanie Kloss, Svenja Kreh, Tine Furler, Thomas Scheibitz, Thomas Zipp, Thomas Zitzwitz
Group exhibition curated by Olivia Berckemeyer
Exotic species of plants, flowers and fungi sprout out of luscious lips, from beneath a drooping eyelid, out of an ear canal. A fetus nestled within a multi-coloured mushroom tree that’s balancing on two interconnected feet. These trippy visions are what artist Celina Teague describes as an attempt at escapism: to shut out the noise and disappear into the weird and wonderful world of nature. It’s Not Me, It’s You, Teague’s solo exhibition at Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery presents a powerful new body of work that breaks away from her news-driven narrative paintings of the past. And yet, the realities and anxieties of the human world continue to creep in.
While Teague’s work is typically born from a place of empathy and rage in response to crisis events, this latest series of paintings took its departure point from a desire to lose herself in a mystical realm where nature holds the power and can bend the mind. It is in the earlier paintings produced for this show that she best evades the grip of current affairs. Both Natural Mystic and Eye Opener – with their vivid forms and almost luminescent colours against nocturnal backdrops – depict a sense of calm and new-found creative freedom. In both paintings, the human and natural worlds are interconnected rather than at odds: portraits of a nourishing form of hybridity in which the human body is enhanced, healed and extended by nature.
However, this vision of harmony slowly evolves into something darker and more complex. In Colour Me Happy the mouth eagerly laps up brightly coloured pills and capsules that also hang from the lower lashes of eyes in the branches of a palm tree. The work reflects on substance abuse, the seedier side of Big Pharma and Teague’s awareness of her own appetite for news consumption. As she notes, our use of the internet, in particular social media, is a contemporary form of addiction – one that encourages snap reactions, polarises as much as it unites and can burp up its memory forevermore.
This sense of lurking danger is most conspicuous in Trippy Slippy whereVenus fly traps crunch down on bugs and strangler plants wrap around the stems of poisonous flowers and insect-devoured leaves. The lips at the bottom of this painting are clamped shut – no longer, it seems, open to nature’s wisdom. It is perhaps no coincidence that back in the real world, bombs are falling and war – even if only experienced through a handset – is shaking humanity. Regardless of Teague’s intent, the news intrudes.
Two text paintings further reflect on the ways in which contemporary society engages with current affairs. Collectively titled The Problem With Humanity: one reads, ‘It’s Not Me, It’s You’ and the other, ‘It’s Not Us, It’s Them.’ The works take playful aim at the ways in which social media is used for passive action: for virtue signalling, to point blame and to reinforce harmful echo chambers that prevent nuanced discussion.
Teague returns to this notion of armchair activism with a continuation of a decade-long series that pokes fun at her role as an artist waving a paintbrush for social causes. These armchair paintings pull together the themes and visuals featured in the rest of the exhibition. In For Better or For Worse opium poppies, Fentanyl lollipops, pills and cannabis leaves grow out of the chair’s fabric. On its seat, a disembodied mouth licks its lips – hungry for more substances and information. We always want more, the artist suggests, even when we tell ourselves to want less.
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