Kategorie: General

Charlie Jeffery (born 1975 in Oxford) studied at the College of Fine Arts in Reading, England. In 2001, he resided at the Fondazione Pistoletto, Cittadellarte in Biella, Italy. In 2010 he was invited by the Mud Office for an artist residency at the Synagogue in Delme. Since 1998 he has been living in Paris. He presented his artistic work in solo exhibitions at Le Quartier, Centre d’art contemporain in Quimper and in group exhibitions at Galerie Michel Rein in Paris, Osan Museum of Art in Korea and Kunstmuseum Olten. He is a lecturer in performance at the F+F School of Art and Design, Zurich, and his most recent performance was staged at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Kunsthalle Lingen is hosting Charlie Jeffery’s first institutional solo exhibition in Germany.

Charlie Jeffery’s artistic work is often process-based. He often works with materials found on site and explores their properties and different valences. Objects made of materials such as plaster or Styrofoam as well as found pieces of clothing flank the interface to design, but it is rather characterized by a surreal language of forms, often the works seem fragile and touch the border to failure. Further, Charlie Jeffery works in painting and performance, often collectively with fellow artists. The exhibition presents a retrospective overview of Charlie Jeffery’s recent work and includes paintings, objects, and sculptures.

Silke Schatz (born 1967 in Celle, lives in Cologne) makes drawings, sculptures and installations. She has presented her artistic work in solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Basel (2002), Boomann Museum in Celle (2006) and Kunstverein Mühlheim an der Ruhr (2012), as well as in group exhibitions at Manifesta 5 in San Sebastian (2004) and Saatchi Gallery in London (2013).

Silke Schatz’s drawings, sculptures and paintings explore architectural situations as public and private places, as carriers of historical as well as contemporary contexts of meaning. The artist develops her work in a deliberately contemporary continuum. She finds points of reference for her work in the aesthetics of modern art and architecture, in the theories of literature and philosophy, as well as in reflections on her own life and the contradictions of our time and society. Silke Schatz has become known for her large, often wall-filling perspective architectural drawings, which look like extremely accurate building constructions. But confusion creeps into the meticulous system of lines. The precise rendering is not so precise at all, preventing a concrete conception of space through the many interlocking sections and views. Interiors, facades, cross-sections overlap, forming zones of opacity in the transparent drawing. The perspective vanishing lines make the reproduced space appear as a virtual information network.

The exhibition at the Kunsthalle Lingen is entitled „Hands up!“ and includes, on the one hand, already existing works on socially relevant themes, for example a work about the concentration camp Theresienstadt and its location. Furthermore, new works are being created especially for Kunsthalle Lingen that deal with the Lingen nuclear power plant as well as a bunker from the time of World War II, so that a direct engagement with the location of the exhibition forms an important part of the presentation.

Katrin Mayer (born 1974 in Oberstorf) studied art at the HFBK Hamburg from 2002-2006, among others with Eran Schaerf. She developed artistic works for Ludlow38 / Mini Goethe Institut New York (2014), Kunsthalle Bielefeld (2014), Kunstmuseum Stuttgart (2013) or Kunsthaus Bregenz (2011), for example. Her spatial-installative works address interfaces between art, research, architecture, display and decor. She is concerned with an interweaving of visual textures and surfaces with site-specific spatial and historical contexts, often under gender-political questions.

Eske Schlüters (born 1970 in Leer) studied fine arts at the HFBK Hamburg from 1997-2004, among others with Eran Schaerf. Eske Schlüters was involved in exhibitions at the Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn ( 2013), the Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Siegen as well as the Frankfurter Kunstverein (2012). The artist realized solo exhibitions at the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf (2008) and Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Siegen (2006). The relationship between narrative, image, and imagination is a recurring element in Eske Schlüters‘ video installations. In her exploration of found material, she is primarily interested in phenomena of seeing and perceiving, processes of producing images or processes of image-making of what has happened or been seen.

For their joint exhibition at Kunsthalle Lingen entitled „time to sync or swim“, Katrin Mayer and Eske Schlüters are jointly designing an installation that can be experienced both visually and acoustically. It consists of an acoustic-binaural as well as a material-installative „track“ that invites visitors to establish relationships and overlaps of the levels both mentally and physically.

Based on Virginia Woolf’s novel „Orlando“ (1928), the content of the work deals with questions of digital identity and gender construction, the most complex multiplications of which can currently be found in the so-called „Otherkin“ movement on the Internet platform Tumblr. In addition to identifying with other beings, animals, but also plants or things, there is a great differentiation in terms of sexual orientation, for example: „I identify as autistic pangender asexual demiromantic trans-asian cat otherkin“.

Tomas Schmit (1943-2006) was one of the pioneers of the Fluxus movement in the early 1960s. Through Nam June Paik, whom he met in 1961, he became acquainted with George Maciunas and the first Fluxus activities. His close artist friends included George Brecht, Ludwig Gosewitz, Arthur Köpcke, Dieter Roth and Gerhard Rühm.
In 1962 Tomas Schmit participated in the performance Neo-Dada in Music, organized by the Düsseldorfer Kammerspiele, as well as the Parallel Performances of New Music in Amsterdam and developed his first pieces. He subsequently participated in most of the European Fluxus festivals, which took place in Copenhagen, Paris, Düsseldorf, London and Berlin, and organized the much-discussed Festival of New Art at the Technical University in Aachen on July 20, 1964.
During this period, Tomas Schmit played a major role in questioning bourgeois art and the beginnings of a new aesthetic. His correspondence with George Maciunas led to a theoretical examination of the political and aesthetic ideas of the Fluxus period becoming so intensively possible. However, he withdrew early on from active participation in the Fluxus actions, because he was against the dilution of the radical potential of this art form. The basic idea of Fluxus – the withdrawal and avoidance of the spectacle – became the rule of thumb of his intellectual and artistic economy. 1 In one of his texts on Fluxus, Tomas Schmit writes: what I learned, among many other things, from f[luxus]: what you can do with a sculpture, you don’t need to build as a building; what you can do in a picture, you don’t need to do as a sculpture; what you can do with a drawing, you don’t need to do as a picture; what you can clarify on a piece of paper, you don’t need to do as a drawing; and what you can do in your head, you don’t even need a piece of paper! 2
Since the beginning of the 60’s Tomas Schmit was occupied with language and text and began to work in drawing at the end of the 60’s. In drawings, editions and books he negotiates phenomena of perception and the logic of language. His pardoxal and word-playful works belong to the environment of the large research project on the evolution of the senses and thinking. 3 He always starts from his own concrete observations and deals with inexplicable phenomena. To take just one example from one of his texts on his drawing gummihopsen symbolic: sind farben nischenbesetzer? (1985): exercise for the brave: imagine colors that do not exist. 4
Kunsthalle Lingen honors the work of Tomas Schmit, whose tenth anniversary of death is in 2016, with a solo exhibition spanning works. Works from the 1960s to 2005 will be presented. On November 13, 2016 at 11 am, the last day of the exhibition, the Fluxus action zyklus für wassereimer (oder flaschen) (1962) with Hartmut Andres will take place at Kunsthalle Lingen. It is one of the best-known Fluxus pieces by Tomas Schmit, which he performed for the first time in Amsterdam in 1963. It has also been interpreted many times over the years by other actors and artists, including filmmaker Harun Farocki, who took the piece as the starting point for his 2010 film sculpture Umgiessen. The action, Farocki said, avoided symbolism, … there was nothing vitalistic about it. In its simplicity and conclusiveness, it is a Beckett play without words. Despite the uniformity of the action, there was a development; the anti-plot found an end of itself. 5
The exhibition will subsequently travel on to the Kunstverein Bremerhaven (January 21 – March 5, 2017) and the Wilhelm Hack Museum in Ludwigshafen (dates to be announced).
Tomas Schmit was born in Wipperfürth on July 13, 1943, and died in Berlin on October 4, 2006. His most important solo exhibitions were at Kunstverein Hamburg (1977), Kölnischer Kunstverein (1978), Galerie Michael Werner, Cologne and New York (1986 and 1994), DAAD Galerie Berlin and Sprengel Museum Hannover (1987), Kunsthalle Portikus, Frankfurt am Main (1997), Kunstverein Bremerhaven (2005), Museum Ludwig, Cologne and Sammlung Falckenberg, Hamburg (2007). He participated in group exhibitions including documenta 6 in Kassel (1977), from here in Düsseldorf (1984), Chronos and Kairos in Kassel (1999) and Museum of our Wishes in Cologne (2001/2002).