New Viewings #16

Curated by Bettina Steinbrügge

New Viewings \ Lydia Balke

Lydia Balke

Lydia Balke is a painter who combines traditional craftsmanship with an almost surrealistic approach to create a contemporary visual language and topicality, commenting on her surroundings with biting irony. Her world is brutal, monstrous and vicious.

Comforting things are simply not envisaged here. In her mocking manner, she presents the crassly realistic visual language of the gothic subculture: dead foxes, potato bags, murderers, small girls with sadistic grins and Christmas caps. Genitals are draped with spaghetti, while a hammer and sickle are smashed against each other over the head of a girl in a camisole.

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Anna Lena Grau

In her mainly sculptural works, Anna Lena Grau explores the sociological and social significance of empty spaces. Through emptying, hollowing out and reproducing, objects as well as bodies become commodities and lose their specific life of their own.

How does our contemporary relationship between body and space manifest itself actually? In order to give form to these ideas, she refers to model-like figures of thought from the natural and life sciences, such as the „Kleinsche Flasche“, in which interior and exterior surfaces merge seamlessly into one another, or the archaeological imprint, through which traces of long past times are brought to light. Hanne Loreck describes this as follows: „Intellectually and aesthetically attracted by diagrams and study objects, the artist transforms her confrontations into installations. In doing so, she proceeds empirically, from material experiments to filmic research of individual medusas in the Baltic Sea.

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Galerie Barbara Thumm \ New Viewings #16 \ Lydia Balke

Nina Kuttler

Nina Kuttler’s multidisciplinary practice evolves around questions of approaching the anthropocene and a sense of connection between species, time, oneself and others.

In her work, cultural knowledge and mythologies are intertwined with forms of scientific research to ultimately construct a narrative of their own. Rhythmic speech and an observing camera are tools to investigate and comment on the conditions of the environment, in which we live.

Nina Kuttler has developed a radio play for the virtual spaces of Galerie Barbara Thumm. In the piece, the story of electricity is told in fragments with a fascination for creatures such as the electric eel, which were long considered mythical creatures in Europe. The import of these animals from the colonial areas and their further exploration was followed by the development of the commercial use of electricity.

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New Viewings \ Lydia Balke

Verena Schöttmer

Verena Schöttmer, *1981 in Meppen, Germany
lives and works in Hamburg, Germany

Verena Schöttmer is focused on installations, paintings and sculpture. In her work she brings together traditional craftsmanship and popular culture, weaving in social codes and quotes.

Schöttmer mostly works with fabric: fabric as tissue, as a flexible haptic substance or in a stronger architectural vein, as a tapestry or a curtain. In her series „Ghostwritings“ (2017- ongoing), she paints with chlorine bleach on denim. This process of decoloration combines a typical subject of art, a mimetic representation of a flower bouquet with a fashionable phenomenon: the „acid washed jeans“ that was common in the 80s punk scene and stood for nonconformism and subversion. In her work she wants to overcome fixed ascriptions, test borders, and design cross-medial spaces.

Galerie Barbara Thumm \ New Viewings #16 \ Lydia Balke
Galerie Barbara Thumm \ New Viewings #16 \ Lydia Balke
Galerie Barbara Thumm \ New Viewings #16 \ Lydia Balke