New Viewings #16

We are inevitably confronted with what the lack of solidarity and empathy in a climate dominated by post-capitalism leaves behind. There is no way around it, she casts her loneliness and her dreariness frontally in the face of the viewer. There is no such thing as fear, and even less so is the kitsch of dismay. Here, someone throws the state of society and its shortcomings in our faces, challenges us and expects us to react, not to withdraw into our own comfort.

The project for Barbara Thumm’s gallery is based on the models she has been building for her painting for years, which are not normally shown in exhibitions. In the exhibition, we see a tree glued to the wall, which is also depicted in an oil painting. It may be considered one of the models that the artist would have liked to have exhibited in an analogous manner or that she would have liked more people to see. Voilà! Christmas trees appear quite often in unpleasant contexts and the artist had stolen this tree to cement it into a pile of rubble for a year so that it would dry out, annoy the neighbours and could be taped to the wall in time for the next Christmas. Her self-description „Christmas Tree Sadist“ comes to full bloom here.

Lydia Balke was born in Dresden and now lives and works in Hamburg. From 2008-2015, she studied painting with Jutta Koether at the Hfbk Hamburg. Her works are currently on display in the exhibition „Jetzt! Junge Malerei in Deutschland“ („Now! Young Painting in Germany“), which has been at the Kunstmuseum Bonn, the Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz and the Museum Wiesbaden and which is currently on view at the Deichtorhallen Hamburg.

The fascination for certain themes and modes of realization should not, of course, be confused with an individual obsession, since the artist always follows a more general interest in knowledge; this must be called the political. The selected characteristic models and significant structures are transferable to the social field, not one-to-one, but precisely in the mode of the poetic of artistic transformation“.

In the virtual exhibition collage for Galerie Barbara Thumm, Grau transforms the geometric form of a tetrahedron into a simple plastic imprint that is pressed into shape by four fingers. The trigger for the work „Shed“ was so-called „anti-homeless architecture“. From the small intimate touch between four fingers, the artist develops the building blocks for a kind of defensive architecture. In the context of the Corona pandemic, the work can be read as a visualization of a contemporary dichotomy between subjectivity and a solidary self-image. Corona also raises awareness and questions the permeability and fragility of bodies that now live in the home-microcosm. It is a moment of fragility, which finds its form here.

Until then, however, electricity was presented to the public as a oddity in spectacular, sometimes erotically charged experiments; the electric eel was presented as a magical creature.

In the radio play, these stories are interwoven in dialogue, contradicting whilst complementing each other at the same time. The animations shown in the video are historical representations of the electric organ, created on the basis of the first sections of these animals in Europe, as well as the electric field of an electric eel, visualized with modern research methods.