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“Thick impasto swirls of paint and billowing floral forms frame glimpses of a purple and pink sky, portals to another world. Birch Maple Oak Post Rococo, André Hemer’s solo exhibition at Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, Berlin presents a captivating new series of mixed-media and video works that explore the question of how to make a landscape of the contemporary moment. Taking cues from art history, Hemer filters the decadent and illusory aesthetics of the rococo through a modern sensibility to create shifting, layered images that are as unsettling as they are seductive.
The New Zealand-born artist uses scanners and digital photography to capture three-dimensional objects (either found or created from paint) en plein air, recording the changes in light and atmospheric conditions of that particular day. For this series, Hemer has also used AI tools to further extend the images, growing flowers and replacing some shots of sky with generated aerial views to complicate notions of place or more broadly, reality. Not that Hemer aims at realism: he describes his works as ‘amalgamations’ rather than ‘representations’ in the sense that each composition contains multiple layers, processes, mediums and art-historical references. The influence of the rococo period can be seen in the luscious application of paint and rich, iridescent palette that brings to mind silk and velvet fabrics and elaborate ceiling frescoes, but the image that we might expect to appear never quite settles before the eye; instead, we are presented with a maelstrom of gestures that appear caught in a never-ending process of transference between form. The effect is especially dizzying in the tondo paintings where the sculptural painted and two-dimensional digital forms draw the eye in towards the surface, framing a pocket of ethereal sky, while also threatening to consume it.
For Hemer, the act of destabilising his compositions relates to the way in which we consume imagery. As he notes, the continual bombardment of visual material creates a complex and often mis-matched understanding of both history and the places that surround us. Alongside the paintings in the exhibition, he is also showing video works that further explore the melding of organic and inorganic materials. Here, globules of paint spin in the sky to a soundtrack of birdsong and passing cars, recorded by the artist in situ. Once again, our concept of time and place is muddled, forcing us to concentrate less on what we are seeing and more on the bodily experience – how the composition, textures and depths affect our perspective and physical orientation.
Even the title of the exhibition is a mashup: birch, maple and oak are the species of tree that Hemer’s hay fever app identified him as being most allergic to while ‘post rococo’ playfully invokes the idea of an evolved history. The irony, of course, is that in attempting to capture a landscape for contemporary times, a kind of no-place or everywhere, Hemer relies on traditional techniques (and being outdoors) as well as specific temporal conditions. The warm golden, red and peachy tones of this latest series are the result of both a particular light quality and environment. Nevertheless, the resultant works, in their shifting, shimmering hybridity, still manage to evade the trap – or is it deception? – of representation. They are portraits if not of the present moment, then for it.”
“Unravel at Night" deals with motifs found in the story about Penelope in Greek mythology. The exhibition examines her role as Odysseus' waiting and faithful wife from a feminist perspective.
Penelope weaves and waits at home for her husband to return, while Odysseus wanders from place to place on his Odyssey in the Mediterranean. To avoid being married again, she gives herself over to the activity of weaving. Only when the weaving is finished will she be able to take a new husband. At night, she secretly unravels the woven again, in order to never reach the end of her work.
This exhibition understands Penelope's woven creation as an independent artistic position.The latter arises from her seeming powerlessness in the face of a changing world that is inaccessible to her. Her activity stands for self-empowerment within a very limited scope of action.
“Unravel at Night” shows works by artists which deal with the resistance of cyclical processes, time, dissolution and decay. The supposed meaninglessness of destroying what has been created before, but also the process of working slowly, continuously and repetitively, can enable the works to poetically and politically reflect on the present age."
“Look up. Look up in the sky” is an art project comprising the same titled 3D animation VR artwork and mixed media room installation by artist Kristen Rästas.
The displayed works took their first shape during the time the world just started to open up again. Due to this, they address a certain spatial-spiritual self-location as well as the need for freedom for personal development. The digital sphere can offer an essential room to be, communicate and express, yet it carries a dystopian atmosphere in itself. In the moment the human kind destroys the planet’s assets, these spaces will be our only realm of daily escapism. Rästas unfolds his immersive experience within these tensions and asks multilayered questions regarding the reality we are living in, our past and future.
The exhibition reflects on such ambiguous times and questions as if these feelings are now forever lost or just locked in the back of our minds and demands to broaden our perspective by looking deep into our emotional structures. The artworks, in one or another way, all reflect on landscape motifs, in which it is questionable how true to life or how artificial they are. These are in constant search of a digital salvation, of a safe place away from the dangers of the physical world. This exhibition is a journey to self-discovery, coming out of a dark winter, escaping a collective trauma and crisis. It places the viewer onto an open ambient field that symbolises times of innocence. This pictorially is a glimpse of childhood or from other times when it felt like we were more at ease with ourselves and our surroundings.
The fragmented room installation, together with the virtual reality centrepiece, form a poetic whole, in which the artist tells a fictive narrative of self-exploration and the need for daydreaming in order to offer oneself a peace of mind."
„Undigested Images“ is an ongoing series of works on contemporary and future mythologies and the continuation of the exhibition „Barking Dogs in the Head“, which took place in Kinshasa in December 2022.
The series is being shown for the first time in Germany and is currently also on view at the Villa of the Kunststiftung Baden-Württemberg. For the exhibition at Galerie Barbara Thumm, Mukenge/ Schellhammer are developing a hybrid space that combines digital and analog paintings.
Mukenge/Schellhammer process experiences and investigations in the very different social and economic systems of Germany and the Democratic Republic of Congo in an ongoing artistic process that includes digital and analog paintings and drawings, experimental videos, and performances. The duo‘s works are influenced by painting traditions such as Congolese Academicism of the first two decades of our millennium and its counter-movements such as „Peinture Populaire“ and „Partagisme“, but they also draw on styles from international art history as well as contemporary popular culture.
In „Undigested Images“ the duo presents their own and other people‘s stories, memories and situations as fragments of a new language of myth. „Visual storytelling“ emerges, revealing complex connections and unconscious structures beneath dominant contemporary narratives, to which they often form counter-narratives.
„Undigested Images“ presents collages of truth and lies, history and reality, fiction, illusion and simulation, the unconscious and the obvious, the traditional and the popular, personal and collective images. The titular „Undigested Images“ emerge from a radically collaborative work process – a joint spewing of the postcolonial conditions under which the duo exists and produces.
"Lea Mugnaini is an Italian-German artist based in Berlin. She develops visual projects around biomorphic forms through drawing, Cut-outs and sculpture.
Whereas a few years ago, Mugnaini nourished her work by sourcing fragments from historical, natural artifacts and her everyday environment, recently her creative research has been inspired more by a personal introspection, true and imagined narratives. She extracts snippets from women's life stories, dream studies, phantasmagorical and mythological creatures.
Mugnaini thus cultivates and composes a substantial vocabulary, characterized by distinct, organic and inter- connected elements. Although this language seems to be born of spontaneous and free gestures, a protocol lies behind. She draws gentle and irregular forms, elaborating them again and again until they are reduced to their essential state, echoing certain patterns that dreams hold.
We are invited to stop and consider the timeless aspect generated by this realm, which distorts the objects and beings that occupy its unconditional space. Abstract, floating elements emerge, moving, but slowly, an endearing characteristic mirrored in the exhibition's artworks selection.
This first solo show, La Turchese volante by Mugnaini at KWADRAT, brings together early and most recent cut- outs, sculptures and a site-specific mural.
At the start of 2023 the artist produced a corpus of bronze sculptures, two of which are here on display. We’ll take a closer look at La Turchese that inspired the exhibition title. Derived from "il turchese", it refers to the color and stone. By using it as a feminine adjective, a tension is created, as when a seventh chord is used in a musical phrase. This is the beacon of the exhibition, which appears for the first time in Mugnaini's work in the form of a female body. Envisioned as a companion to her artistic process, its inception paves the way for a long-term project.
The selection of works on paper are set on a white surface, underscoring the suspension of forms in a totally abstract, oniric dimension. They invite us to question our personal relationship with the space we inhabit, while sleeping. These forms bring to the surface what we confuse with reality, touching a part of our uncon- scious, to reveal a suspended time."
Text: Livia Tarsia in Curia
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