#michaelaeichwald

[walmat]

Preview of the Exhibition 'Alles war klar'/'Everything was clear' @kuenstlerhauswien After more than three years refurbishment Künstlerhaus is back at Karlsplatz. Swipe for more 👉 1 Staircase 2 Thomas Baldischwyler, Installation with Artworks of different artists 3 Agata Ingarden 4 Cäcilia Brown 5 Anna Artaker 6 Toni Schmale (black Objects), Michaela Eichwald (Paintings) 7 Installation of Members Künstlerhaus Wien 8 Adam Kraft . . #kuenstlerhauswien #alleswarklar #reopening #ThomasBaldischwyler #AgataIngarden #CäciliaBrown #AnnaArtaker #ToniSchmale #MichaelaEichwald #AdamKraft #meinkuenstlerhaus #artinvienna #ArtsyVisualStorytelling #walmatwien #ig_ometry #igersaustria #igersvienna (at Künstlerhaus Wien) https://www.instagram.com/p/B9W-I6ml0A_/?igshid=1kmiubk7dsvxy

[estherattarmachanek]

@kuenstlerhauswien @schmalentoni #thegoodenoughmother 2017. #michaelaeichwald #evidenz 2020 https://www.instagram.com/p/B9WUaSqFI5L/?igshid=6sn12j5qapgk

[porcileorg]

On the group show ‘Greater Than the Sum’ @ Jahn und Jahn, Munich (2019-10-24 – 2019-12-14)

Participating artists: Kerstin Brätsch, Michaela Eichwald, Helen Marten, Sarah Ortmeyer, Laure Prouvost 

Author: Magda Wisniowska - Munich, November, 2019.

Citing Synergy I am guilty as much as the next person of name-dropping philosopher’s names in discussions about art. So, while I have a lot of sympathy for how the curators choose to frame the exhibition “Greater than the Sum” at Jahn und Jahn, I also wonder at their reference to Aristotle’s claim, “The whole is more than the sum of its parts.”

In their press release they write,

Each artistic position shown in this group exhibition appears unique, original, and complex. Through their combination, the works solidify into a new formation, encouraging a re-examination of the whole. Borrowing from Aristotle’s claim that “The whole is more than the sum of its parts”, Greater than the sum reveals new synergies [click link]. 

The lack of further context makes this reference to the concept of synergy difficult to place. Very simply, why Aristotle? And why now, when the concept’s heyday was the interwar period of the psychological theory of Gestalt? At the time, research into synergy had a bearing on an art history rooted in the psychology of art, but this was tied to the pursuit of naturalistic representation that art has long since abandoned. Maybe it is precisely this troubled history that makes the reference to synergy interesting, but it also makes the exhibition easy to dismiss as a collection of moderately successful artists from whom the gallery can profit. Or more generously, perhaps it gives the viewer a rare opportunity to focus on the work outside of an established discursive frame.  What kind of “new synergies” does the exhibition reveal?

Fragments Without a Whole The first work to see when you enter is by the award winning English artist, Helen Marten. A face the same colour as your desk is like many of her sculptures, a tightly controlled collection of odd objects, some familiar, some personal and some downright bizarre. A small and much too narrow whitish desk stands assertively yet precariously, its extravagant base kept from wobbling by a number of folded bits and pieces, far more than necessary. There are a few things on the desk and many more in the wastepaper laundry bin close by. One of a series, this work was shown for the first time to mark the opening of the Kunsthalle Zürich, in the exhibition “Almost the Exact Shape of Florida”, 2012. A later version was shown at the Chisenhale in 2013, launching the artist’s career and leading to her Turner prize nomination in 2016. At these earlier exhibitions the work was always part of a larger installation, standing behind the totemic One for a bin, one for a bench, but even in its current much reduced form, Marten’s aim of rendering linguistic operations physical through displacement, rearrangement and juxtaposition is very much apparent. On Marten’s “highly wrought” work, Guardian critic Adrian Searle wrote that you cannot “tell the detail from the main event” [click link], nonetheless I cannot help thinking that her arrangement of details is such that it never quite forms an entire whole.

Deferral of the Whole Behind Marten’s work is a painted collage by German artist, Michaela Eichwald Memory-Klinik-Notluke-Persönlichkeitsschale. Again, the piece is an older one, shown previously in 2012 at the Mathew gallery in Berlin. Aiming to resist the perceived exploitation of subjectivity by the neoliberal social media, this earlier exhibition was organised around the idea of the personal that refused to be subsumed under the category of personality. Certainly, the personal has a complicated history in this particular painting, one fragment previously part of a different collage, No drink No talk Just beautiful, in turn first a drawing on an invite for a show by a friend of the artist, Gunar Wardenbach. The idea of the fragment is important to the work, but once again, this fragment is of an imperfect and incomplete kind, where formation into a whole is continually deferred.

A Lost Whole? On the other wall and in the other room are paintings and objects by the Vienna-based Sarah Ortmeyer. Ortmeyer is relatively well known in Munich, having had a large show at the local Kunstverein only last year. The work she presents at Jahn und Jahn is similar to that she had shown earlier, a couple of her chessboard paintings and ostrich egg objects from the previous exhibition. In the paintings a checkerboard obscures an image of the sky; the eggs act as anthropomorphically stylised chess pieces. But where her investigation into the game’s principles and its gender attributions made sense in the large space of the Kunstverein, here, in smaller rooms and separated into two by a dividing wall, it gets lost. Like a chess game it very much needs all sixteen pieces in order to begin play.

Undermining of the Whole New York-based Kerstin Brätsch also had a large exhibition in Munich recently, at the Brandhorst in 2017. The piece she shows here is again familiar from that exhibition - one of the large scale paper pieces utilising marbling technique framed by neon tubes - but this time, the work is given (no pun intended) space to shine. Covering one whole wall at the end of the room, it has an altar-like quality, lending credence to its reference to the Hawaiian snow goddess Poli’ahu and her three sisters. Red eyes rimmed by vivid green really do seem to acquire a preternatural glow, demonstrating the truth of Beau Rutland’s observation for ArtForum, that the “proliferation of voices” characteristic of her work, can in some cases be a burden [click link]. In the Brandhorst, the work was presented as one of a series and had to compete for our attention, not just within the series, but with the stain glass works Brätsch made in collaboration with Urs Rickenbach. The more formal type of work on paper was also distributed throughout the museum, making it easier to compare the artist’s particular kind of mark making - its billowy formations, rainbow striations and sharp awkward angles - from one body of work to the next. Surrounded as it was in the Brandhorst by such abundance of collocations, precursors, models, genres and disciplines, it is easy to understand Daniela Stöppel’s claim, that the work both exemplifies the kind of contemporary art that belated brings traditional aura-laden painting into an expanded field, as well as disrupting this narrative [click link]. At Jahn und Jahn however, the work’s elusive materiality comes to the fore. Just as with the stain-glass pieces, where work’s physicality is undermined by its transparency, here the surface is rendered fragile, the resulting layer of ink as much a product of the chemical make-up of each pigment or the wave patterns in the liquid, as it is of the artist (and her collaborator’s) hand. It has a presence yet threatens to dissolve right before our eyes.

Wholly Confused French Laure Provoust is another Turner prize winner known for her video, installation and performance work. Like Ortmeyer and Brätsch she had already shown in Munich, having the exhibition at the Haus der Kunst in 2016. She also famously represented France at this year’s Venice Biennale with her complex transformation of the French pavilion space. She is therefore perhaps the best-known artist of the five. Which makes the gallery’s choice of work very curious because it is so uncharacteristic - not a video but a painting-type work, not part of an installation, but a stand-alone. You Could Hear this Image (2017) is a tapestry first shown as part of a group in the exhibition “LOOKING AT YOU, LOOKING AT US” at Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris, itself a reference to a previous exhibition and collaboration, “The Aube’s cure Parle Ment” at the Kadist Foundation in 2017. The tapestry belongs to a complex narrative highlighting the notion of obscurity, its construct explored during the latter show. At the Obadia exhibition, metal men and metal women, stick figures with LCD screen heads far too big for their bodies, would greet you and invite you to walk around a central platform - the tapestries, as the artist states, “sewn by grandma,” decorate the walls so that you can contemplate parle ment’s affairs [click link]. Yet without knowing all of this, one is left with a woven, grey negative image of a trumpet player, uncertain of whether to view it conceptually or formally, a fragment or part of a whole.

[worldfoodbooks]

OPEN TODAY 12-4 PM. NEW IN THE BOOKSHOP: THE LOVE OF PAINTING : GENEALOGY OF A SUCCESS MEDIUM by ISABELLE GRAW (2018) • Painting seems to have lost its dominant position in the field of the arts. However, looking more closely at exhibited photographs, assemblages, installations, or performances, it is evident how the rhetorics of painting still remain omnipresent. Following the tradition of classical theories of painting based on exchanges with artists, Isabelle Graw’s The Love of Painting considers the art form not as something fixed, but as a visual and discursive material formation with the potential to fascinate owing to its ability to produce the fantasy of liveliness. Thus, painting is not restricted to the limits of its own frame, but possesses a specific potential that is located in its material and physical signs. Its value is grounded in its capacity to both reveal and mystify its conditions of production. Alongside in-depth analyses of the work of artists like Édouard Manet, Jutta Koether, Martin Kippenberger, Jana Euler, and Marcel Broodthaers, the book includes conversations with artists in which Graw’s insights are further discussed and put to the test. • Available today in the bookshop and via our website. • #worldfoodbooks #theloveofpainting #isabellegraw #sternbergpress #painting #juttakoether #janaeuler #martinkippenberger #sigmarpolke #frankstella #marcelbroodthaers #isagenzken #jeanfautrier #gerhardrichter #joanmitchell #helenfrankenthaler #mathieumalouf #jorgimendorf #edouardmanet #ellsworthkelly #michaelaeichwald (at WORLD FOOD BOOKS)

[worldfoodbooks]

NEW IN THE BOOKSHOP: OPTIK SCHRÖDER II (2018) • Curated by Karola Kraus, the exhibition Optik Schröder II presents a representative selection from the collection of Alexander Schröder to date. This includes important works by Kai Althoff, Tom Burr, Bernadette Corporation, Claire Fontaine, Gelitin, Isa Genzken, Anne Imhof, Sergej Jensen, Pierre Klossowski, Manfred Pernice, Martha Rosler, and Reena Spaulings, and is one of the most important German private collections of contemporary art. • These works illustrate some of the key conceptual trends and positions in the development of Western art in the past three decades, including references to social issues, queer lifestyles, the critique of institutions and the economy, critical investigation of public spaces and architecture, poetry, and contemporary forms of critical painting. The prominently represented artists’ collectives exemplify endeavors to challenge and transform the traditional roles and systems of the artist, of art production, and of the sale of art. • This comprehensive overview shows a collection built up consistently since the mid-1990s and based on close proximity to the artists and sensitivity for new developments. The collection illustrates an exemplary philosophy of collecting focusing on the nature of the contemporary, on curiosity, expertise, humor, independence, and outstanding aesthetic judgement. • Features: Kai Althoff, Lutz Bacher, Cosima von Bonin, KP Brehmer, Tom Burr, Merlin Carpenter, Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Anne Collier, Bernadette Corporation, Lukas Duwenhögger, Jana Euler, Cerith Wyn Evans, Claire Fontaine, Gelitin, Isa Genzken, Ull Hohn, Karl Holmqvist, Alex Hubbard, Peter Hujar, Anne Imhof, Sergej Jensen, Martin Kippenberger, Pierre Klossowski, John Knight, Michael Krebber, Mark Leckey, Klara Lidén, Lucy McKenzie, Christian Philipp Müller, Henrik Olesen, Paulina Olowska, Dietrich Orth, Manfred Pernice, Josephine Pryde, Martha Rosler, Cameron Rowland, Andreas Slominski, Reena Spaulings, Katja Strunz, Philippe Thomas, Danh Vo, Peter Wächtler • Design: Studio Manuel Raeder. • #worldfoodbooks #kaialthoff #henrikolesen #michaelaeichwald #annecollier (at WORLD FOOD BOOKS)