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The Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, in the 75th-anniversary year of the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, dedicates the months of November and December to the exhibition 'The Vanishing Bodies' by the Italian artist Sabatino Cersosimo.
In Berlin since 2011, Cersosimo began painting on steel using oxidation process and oil colors. Since then, the concepts of time, will, and chance have been fundamental to the entire process of his artistic work.
Given the degenerative nature of oxidation, Cersosimo's work creates a parallel with life itself: we are born, we grow, and we mature. Art is historically considered eternal, but these paintings emphasize its metamorphic nature: we are looking at a work of art that develops, stratifies, and, in some cases, mutates into other forms, much like the elements of nature on the planet.
The distinctive map and architecture of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, along with its large, multidimensional spaces, invite a fascinating introspective look at the relationship between humanity and space. The architecture not only alludes to the complexities of the human brain and human life in general but also emphasizes the connections between the individual and society.
Cersosimo's works harmoniously complement the Institute's architecture by reflecting on humanity and its changing complexities in time and space.
Paintings on steel especially, but also on OSB, paper and PVC will be shown.
The exhibition catalogue includes essayes by Luisa Catucci (Galleria Luisa Catucci), Nicola E. Petek (independent curator), and Beniamino Fortis (aesthetics scholar).
The Opening Event will be accompanied by a Live Sound Installation by Aseret + Ana Gagulidze (Violin) and Duae (Voice)
“Knowledge rests not upon truth alone, but upon error also.”
Carl Jung
By definition, an error is the deviation of a state, process or result from a norm, the rules or a goal. It is generally considered to be an action that is inaccurate or wrong. However, the etymology derives from the Latin term 'errare', which means 'to go astray'. So how about we look at a mistake not as an error, but as a wandering, a search for a path other than the normative one. In art, many searches off the beaten track resemble just that, a foray into one's own openness and vulnerability.
In ancient Greek theatre, there were conflicts that could not always be resolved by human action. Their resolution or decision came ‚from above‘ through the surprising intervention of a deity who gave the final turn to the events. Artists often rely on the intervention of the higher, the ‚Deus Ex Machina‘. On being able to surrender to the anarchic movement of the hand or the will of the brush, which offers solutions within the painting process that cannot be achieved intellectually – allowing for error while wandering into the unconscious. The artists chosen for this exhibition seem to embark on an exploratory journey into the transcendence of the imagination. The engaging expression of their works bundles the various theories and philosophical directions they grapple with.
Curated by Nicola E. Petek
With questions of “care” being at the forefront of the art world, popular psychology and mainstream culture for the last few years, Objects of Care aims to critically explore what it is to one another.
How do we visualise it, when we allow ourselves to experience it, where do we seek to find it? How does it move from the personal to the collective,how can it bring us together?
The group exhibition gathers work from thirteen artists, each of whom addresses the subject from either different, related, and in some cases, contradictory perspectives. Its programme explores the politics of care through cultural identity, memory, technology, ecology and ritualism, with further interrogation of how kindness relates to the material.
In this show care moves away from the space of the mind and becomes a living thing.
As the world becomes undone
I become undone with it
I mend
Repair
I bring the world together
Care, is a tangible thing
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Vernissage: 9/11/23 6-10pm
with live set 9 - 10pm by Ortansia Rhastoni
Performance * Mamá y Papá*
10/11/23, 7:30pm by YiTen Lai Fernandez
Workshop *Nest - Sewing Circle*
11/11/23, 12-2pm by Miriam Poletti
LAGE EGAL is very pleased to invite the curatorial group EMIK PROJECTS to present a solo exhibition by the artist EVERETT BABCOCK entitled NOTHING IN THAT DRAWER.
EVERETT BABCOCK uses furniture from his own apartment and other commonplace things from his everyday surroundings to make the sculptures, wall works, and an installation exhibited at IN THE RACK ROOM. He combines various materials in response to their capacity to resonate with human conditions. These tinkered assemblages take on the form of characters that fluctuate between figuration and abstraction, and they flaunt their material moods, eliciting peculiar emotions. The work aspires to make the relationship between feeling and substance, between us and things, more clear.
The staging of things here, whether they be neatly stacked, energetically piled, slightly anthropomorphized, or traditionally hung on the wall, is a reaction to the affects of things. The two most prominent sculptures have personas. Part head and part guts, they play roles that their conventional selves normally hide. The sculpture, Square but Edgy, has composure, its tidy contents follow the stacking logic of their own orderly forms. The calm textures and quiet colors put on a prim and proper attitude, but the indulgence of a bad habit suggests a longing to be cool, or perhaps the fragility of its poise. The other sculpture, Tender but Stuffy, is vulnerable and outwardly irritable. The crammed cushiony insides are resilient and can absorb some hits, but it’s still trying to hold back an outburst. Sick of everyone’s bullshit, it wears a squishy disgruntled expression and tries to insulate itself from the overwhelming loudness. It may be touchy, but only because it’s soft on the inside.
Also in the space are smaller works, some on the wall and some among an installation of wood and foam. In some of them, small drawers become character studies. The work, Accessorize, never forgets to adorn itself, and the work, Rauhaus has a rough but appreciative understanding of art history. Others, like the tiny wall works, are playfully made formal explorations of the materials found throughout the exhibition.
The title of the exhibition is borrowed from a Ron Padgett poem of the same name. When the 14 identical lines are read aloud, the words reveal their materiality, each utterance feeling different than the last; the words as repetitive vibrations become weird. These material reiterations are a kind of attentiveness that shows us the strange vitality and expressive capacity of things. In the exhibition, similar reiterations are spoken in the language of assemblage, where accumulated stuff is puzzled into once functional drawers; The drawers frame and squish the materials like a poem does to words. When these seemingly banal things are repeated in this format, the materials accentuate their emotive qualities.
Everett Babcock - "Passt (A stack careful to the top, Occupying upwards and against, Each slight presence, Splintered whole half or otherwise, Could tumble were it not, For support)", 2023
MINDSCAPES is a series of new works of self-portraits and the spaces which embraces them. It is a reference to the historical portrait as well as a reflection of the perspective of a space, and the coexistence of the real and imaginary which the mind creates.
Janine Mackenroth works on themes of equality and sustainability. With plant-based (nail) polish she creates paintings, questions traditional gender roles, but also the materiality of art itself. On the occasion of her exhibition “POOL POSITIONS” at aquabitArt Gallery, she releases the plant-based nail polish color “TWENTY EURO BLUE” – the blue of the 20-euro bill. It runs as a “blue thread” through her pool installation in the gallery spaces – in her painting, as threads of the bacterium Escherichia coli, is found in a scent work, as well as in the pool itself, filled with a million shredded euro bills. The artist also refers to her new studio in a former swimming pool from the 70s in Munich.
Valérie Favres paintings open up fresh narratives and conceptual perspectives, moving between figuration and abstraction.
Her works are dominated by a fictional world made up of contrasts, contradictions, resistance and restlessness.
She works in an openly experimental manner, using a repertory informed by art history. Her demands of the medium are extensive; she is always engaged in a radical interrogation both painting and artistic work processes. Favre paints scenes developed over the course of several years in large series and work cycles. The exhibition “Intérieurs” traces some of these series back to their beginnings and shows an early group of works, painted when Favre first moved to Berlin, between 2000 and 2001. Many of her later motifs and compositions can be already found in the large scale paintings.
Favre explains: “‘Intérieurs’ is a series of paintings that I made when I came to Berlin in 1999. A large part of these works are key paintings. Exemplary paintings. It is a source that I promised myself I would return to one day. Possibly now is the right time to do so?
In the ‘Intérieurs’ series, there are motifs such as the tree and the deer, which I revisited a few years later in the ‘Forest’ series. The graphic representation of the female body also hints at the ‘Lapine Universe’ series. You can already see the edges of the canvases, which are left blank, similar to the series ‘At the Table’. The ‘Intérieurs’ also hint at the series ‘The Small Theatres of Life’ through their impressions of collages of shapes and different layers of composition.
The paintings in the ‘Intérieurs’ series mark a departure from my earlier series of paintings created over many years in Paris. (I lived and worked there since the early 1980s.) They include ‘Périmètre’ and ‘Robe Rouge’, among others.
These paintings are explorations of my personal thought processes, my emotionality expressed in painting, in the face of the contemporary German and especially Berlin art scene, in which I have immersed myself with all my energy.
One of the paintings shown here, has already been exhibited in the show ‘Malkunst’ curated by Birgit Hoffmeister at the Mudima Foundation in Milan from November 6 to December 6, 2000.“
(Valérie Favre, October 2023)
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