Curator`s Choice II shows a selection of six artists put together by Florian Schmid. As the exhibition title already implies, this is a personal selection in which the individual artistic positions do not necessarily have a connection in terms of content. However, there are formal points of contact.
Wolfgang Flad, born in Reutlingen in 1974, lives and works in Berlin.
The artist works as a painter and sculptor, whereby the interweaving of material and content plays a central role. In the context of the exhibition Flad presents works from the series dark side of the moon. The surfaces etched in construction foam panels behind multichromatic glass panes constantly change their color and formal appearance depending on the viewers point of view and the incidence of light. The title of the work series refers to the symbolic satellite whose cratered structure is part of our collective memory, even if we only see one side of it. What remains hidden from us is the dark side of the moon. This heightens the mystique of the narrative and draws attention to the fact that what we see does not encompass everything that actually exists in reality.
Jay Gard, born 1984 in Halle (Saale), lives and works in Berlin.
Jay Gard creates works whose visual language combines aesthetics and rationality. His works are characterized by a strict geometric formal language and are conceptually structured. Gard mainly uses wood, plywood and steel, whose surfaces he paints with industrial colors. In the process, sanding marks, angular or dimensional calculations may well remain visible, indicating the working process. Gard's works include room-sized installations as well as sculptural murals. His works cite and ironize codes of art, culture, and design history. Gard reinterprets and recontextualizes them by stripping them of their original meaning and turning them into patterns, pictorial elements, or forms. Multilayeredness and three-dimensionality always play a major role here. He creates these either physically in his wall objects or through painterly refinement in his paintings.
Vanessa Henn, born 1970 in Stuttgart, lives and works in Berlin.
In her installations and objects, the artist skillfully combines formal reduction and playful wit. Her motifs are inspired by everyday objects. With a perceptive eye, Henn filters those architectural elements from their surroundings that regulate the flow of the public, such as footbridges, railings or signposts. She fragments these, thus removing them from their original context and transforming them into a sculptural discourse. In her latest works she combines these elements with found and partly reworked stone or concrete. In an exciting way, the artist blurs the boundaries between image, sculpture and spatial installation, whereby the original functionality of the elements used recedes into the background and the formal-aesthetic event comes to the fore. A system-immanent sculptural discourse, so to speak, that makes charmingly ironic references to our everyday lives.
Peter Krauskopf, born 1966 in Leipzig, lives and works in Berlin.
The artist is a painter by deepest conviction and deals intensively with questions of this medium. With the process of overpainting, he constantly discards, renews and changes his works and thus creates his own palimpsest. Layers upon layers are applied with oil on linen or on paper, preserving the temporality of the artistic process. In some series of works, Krauskopf leaves it at the additive layering of color surfaces. In others, he partially removes the previously applied layers by scraping them out with a wide variety of tools, thus working his way back to the origin of his painting process.
Anja Schwörer, born 1971 in Kandel, lives and works in Berlin
Anja Schwörer's works are dedicated to the tension between cause and effect, order and disorder, systemic control and chance. The formal grids and symmetries she uses are elementary modes for structuring and organizing the surface of the image. At the same time, the artist also works on a sensual level, in which the materiality of her works plays an important role. Schwörer investigates the properties and texture of fabrics such as cotton, velvet, and denim, particularly their textures, tactile qualities, permeability, and ability to absorb water, dye, and bleach. Schwörer folds, staples and laces the fabrics and then applies them to stretcher frames. In doing so, she always follows a geometric order, developing structures, rhythms, and sequences.
Esther Stocker, born 1974 in Schlanders, South Tyrol, lives and works in Vienna.
Her works are based on basic geometric principles that are broken up in rhythmic balance. By reducing the colors to black, white and various grays, the disruptions of the fixed grids clearly emerge and thus dynamize the pictorial space. At the center of the confrontation is the dialogue of static systems and the deviations from these very systems. Esther Stocker builds her pictorial systems strictly according to the dialectical principle that chaos can only be demonstrated in interaction with order. Thus she is always looking for the representability of the vague in systemic functionality and the immanent vagueness of exact forms. She herself says: "Systemlessness can only be described by systems, it is part of the system. Behind a chaos there is always also a kind of order".
FS.ART, 2023
FS.ART - Curator`s Choice II, Berlin
