25 Sep 30 Oct 2020 Karşı Sanat Çalışmaları Istanbul
ANNEKE BOSMA video DANIEL GEIGER painting HENRIËTTE VAN ‘T HOOG painting GONGHONG HUANG painting DAVID KEFFORD sculpture, photography, film and animation OLEKSIY KOVAL painting VERONIKA WENGER drawing, film MICHAEL WRIGHT drawing, painting, video
Curated by SOPHIE-CHARLOTTE BOMBECK
In the agony of systems of symbols (systems of expression) a picture is the most boring and tiresome opponent of painting. However, it has happened time and again that one is confused with the other. Perhaps they are not rivals after all, and there is no difference at all between a painting and an image?
German / English 120 pages 56 color photos 220 x 210 x 13 mm 500 g
EUR 24,90
Special thanks for your valuable cooperation and creation of this catalogue to DR. EZGI BAKCAY, SOPHIE-CHARLOTTE BOMBECK, EDUARD KASTNER, OLEKSANDR KOVAL, OLEKSIY KOVAL, PROF. BERNHARD LYPP, SERENA SEMERARO, MICHAEL WRIGHT
Contributed text DR. EZGI BAKCAY, SOPHIE-CHARLOTTE BOMBECK, PROF. BERNHARD LYPP, SERENA SEMERARO, VERONIKA WENGER
Translation SIMON EASTWOOD & MICHAEL WRIGHT
Photo editing DESIGNSTUDIO KOVAL
Photographs BOXES ART MUSEUM SHUNDE, KLAUS MAUZ, REUTEN GALERIE AMSTERDAM, RHYTHM SECTION, UNITED ART MUSEUM WUHAN
Overall production KASTNER AG
The first edition of this publication was generously supported by KASTNER AG, WOLNZACH ARSVERSA KUNST-STIFTUNG, FREIBURG
DANIEL GEIGER MICHAEL GRAEVE HENRIËTTE VAN ’T HOOG DAVID KEFFORD OLEKSIY KOVAL GUIDO NIEUWENDIJK SERENA SEMERARO XIAO TANG VERONIKA WENGER MICHAEL WRIGHT
An omnipresence and invisibility of a phenomenon of our time is the digital – not the information age per se, but its novelty and revolutionary power in all areas of life up to art and art production. Like air and water, the digital is now noticed by its absence rather than its presence. Computers are a comprehensive but invisible part of our everyday life.
In our exhibition ‚ambiguous unambiguous‘ we wanted to presents both analogue and digital works by the artists and juxtaposes the respective positions. Not to be confined by the greatest, yet to be contained within the smallest is a definition, which declared the enterprise of the artists group Rhythm Section. The substantive trait, which linked the artists of the group Rhythm Section in their works is the commitment to a hyper reflexivity in dealing with the rhythm, not as a compulsion, but as an original constant. The clear handling of the rhythm allows an endless variety of individual variations. Thereby the exhibition deals with the topic of new, analogue-digital combinations.
What does the advent of digital mean for art production? What does it mean when “new media”, which were celebrated for several decades in special festivals and institutions, have lost innovation? Is this a sustainable effect whose potential cannot yet be assessed? Which genre-spanning methods can be extracted from the field of “new media” and transferred into thinking figures that reach beyond it?
Due to the current situation and the circumstances of these times, we have decided to show one digital work of each artist in the digital show of the fair 2020 and have renounced the analog counterpart in form of a digital image. Art is always an expression of its time and the environment in which it is created. Instead of the planned juxtaposition of the two types of work, we invite you now more than ever to explore the very different digital means, materials, forms and formats used by the artists. We hope to be able to present the juxtaposition of both analogue and digital at the fair in 2021.
Now in its eighth consecutive year, Platforms Project is the international show that indicatively charts the art currently produced through collective initiatives by young artists on the international scene as they join forces to seek answers to contemporary artistic questions.
Platforms Project establishes a new approach to art viewing via Platforms Project Net, a web-based art fair.
We stay at home but we continue to create and bring together the voices of the independent art scene, demonstrating the power of art and technology.
The Platforms Project Net will enable the art-loving public to access the artists’ groups and their works via a digital exhibition. Viewers can try a new experience by visiting the Platforms Project website for 15 days, from 14 to 31 May 2020 at www.platformsproject.com
Ezgi Bakçay Sophie-Charlotte Bombeck Veronika Wenger Michael Wright
Istanbul – London – Munich April 24, 2020
„You cannot approach the work of Veronika Wenger with your bulky clothes. You cannot walk on her lines in high heels. How do I know it? Because I fell down. […] Veronika Wenger has an elegant equilibrium, a well moderate climate, an open clear sky. Her work doesn’t insist, doesn’t impose itself. But in her serene silence there is hospitality for every first step“
Dr. Ezgi Bakçay 2020, In: The Stages of Eternity, The Line / Die Linie, Veronika Wenger, Catalog (coming soon!)
Veronika Wenger’s works require a sensitivity and truth for the material, in the way the material embodies the consciousness of an artist. In the search for truth, ‘the beautiful work’ is a by-product of this search. The artistic production embodies the invisible and inner, a remnant, left behind traces of the experienced. The power of her works becomes visible in super+Centercourt. Our conscious experience is based on a complex accumulation of memory and unconscious material, which forms both our sense of self-identity and the basis of our relationship to experience. Wenger attempts to “hold” this in an intense performative act of drawing. In addition to the two large-format drawings, the artist will create a wall piece in the super+Centercourt during the course of the exhibition and allow us to participate in this very process of creation.
Black and white lines that fling in and out of each other, centripetal and centrifugal forces, rhythms, dynamically flowing traces, both positive and negative; remnants. Between found and invented, unconscious and conscious, past and present, between original and alienated, Veronika Wenger’s works reveal a sensual insight to us.
Outlines and volumes of a woman’s body, a dancer barely recognizable – the plastic appears only as a formal quality. The physical not only determines our perception, the physical is found on the side of the perceived. The abstract drawings make it clear that the body has by no means been abolished, but (merely) the modalities of its representation have been transformed. To see Wenger’s drawings is like listening to them read aloud in another language that simultaneously evokes linear and open spatial surfaces, to put it somewhat paradoxically. Her works move between a free figuration, free from all description of the object, and a poetizing figuration of often only vaguely hinted at architectures, figures or language. The possibilities of drawing are carefully explored: linear and coloured movements, rhythmic structures, still and delicate, dynamic and rapid. But the drawings on paper, MDF and cardboard show nothing of physical reality, they are not even abstract in the sense that they are a shortage of something found, they are simply non-representational. On a monochrome ground, lines, fleeting strokes, are to be found, which stretch, cross and circle. Colour is added, but remains locally limited – which makes them all the more expressive.
They are fragments, signs, forms, traces, letters and lines of a mental, inner world. It is the presence and absence of the trace, its appearance and disappearance, its storage and being remembered or its loss and lost absence that draws us into the spell of her works.
The proximity of memory to writing, one of her vehicles, is obvious. Writing frees daily facts from the pull of forgetting. But at the same time it translates all primary experiences (what we see before us, what happens to us, even the shaking of love and death). Thus the works appear as a meaningful juxtaposition of chaos and straightforwardness that creates a dialogue between memories of traces, choreography, dance or performance. A cosmos of connections and references that can be found again and again in the serial works. A continuous element is the line, it separates and connects at the same time. The emotional-objective lines, whose beautiful autonomy can be addictive, frees the line from the ground or the ground from the line, and yet both are preserved. It connects the visible forms to an endless connection between inside and outside, surface and form. It reinforces a symmetry of depth dimension. Through its rhythmic division, the experience of depth, movement, the conscious and the unconscious is created, whereby the works not least gain in temporality.
Veronika Wenger, 1967, lives and works in Munich. She studied from 1990 – 1996 at the Academy of Arts in Munich. She teaches at various academies in Germany and abroad, including Wuhan, Zurich, University of Hertfordshire, Tehran. Numerous exhibitions at home and abroad, e.g. Amsterdam, Istanbul, London, Odessa, Berlin, Istanbul Art Fair Tüyap. Further information about the artist can be found at www.veronikawenger.de.
The super+Centercourt will be temporarily closed. However, on request and in a private setting, we offer you guided tours and discussions with the artist. If you are interested, please register via mail info@centercourt.gallery or by phone at 01724703315.
The exhibition program will also be accompanied by talks, interviews and the catalogue of the same name published on the web via Facebook, Instagram and on our homepage.
