Thomas Scheibitz: Plateau mit Halbfigur / Kathrin Sonntag: Things Doing Their Thing

Thomas Scheibitz: Plateau mit Halbfigur
With a height of 20 metres, the cube-shaped Kesselhaus (Boiler House) at the KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art is a unique venue for art in Berlin. Starting in September 2018, Thomas Scheibitz will continue the series of artists who have developed a site-specific work for this spectacular exhibition space. Following Roman Signer, David Claerbout, and Haegue Yang, Scheibitz is now the first artist in the series to have created a free-standing sculpture.

Painting and sculpture have an equally important place in Thomas Scheibitz’s artistic practice. The basis for his work is always his wide-ranging collection of two- and three-dimensional things: handwritten notes, newspaper clippings, magnificent illustrated books, quickly jotted sketches, and curious objects—the artist collects, filters, organises, and archives all these things. This material then undergoes a variety of processes of transformation and thus flows into the creative process.

With Plateau mit Halbfigur, Thomas Scheibitz will realise his largest sculpture to date in the Kesselhaus. The development of this multi-part work—an intensive process of sculpting and determining the dimensions for the enormous space of the Kesselhaus—took around one and a half years. The title Plateau mit Halbfigur primarily refers to the plinth-like structure that creates an autonomous space for the individual parts. At the same time, it refers to the fundamentally fragmentary and emphasises the work’s cut-out quality. The complex sculpture in seven parts, which is eight and a half metres tall at its highest point, blends into the cube-shaped Kesselhaus with surprising ease.

The exhibition is curated by Andreas Fiedler.

A two-volume exhibition catalogue will be published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König in Cologne.

Thomas Scheibitz (b. 1968) lives and works in Berlin. His works have been shown internationally in exhibitions including Masterplan\kino (Kunstmuseum Bonn and Wilhelm-Hack-Museum, Ludwigshafen, 2018), Inherent Structure (Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio, United States, 2018), Excitement – Exhibition by Rudi Fuchs (Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 2016), Picasso in Contemporary Art (Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, 2015), Radiopictures (Sprüth Magers, Berlin, 2014), Studio Imaginaire (Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, 2014), and ONE-Time Pad (BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK, 2013 and MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main, 2012).

Kathrin Sonntag: Things Doing Their Thing
Kathrin Sonntag’s works examine the conditions of seeing, perceiving, and recognising. Her finely balanced installations lead visitors to make mental mistakes, create ambiguities about space, time, object, or architecture, and blur the boundary between photographic representation and reality.

In her exhibition Things Doing Their Thing, Sonntag will be showing objects, slide projections, and collages as well as a photo installation. With subtle interventions in the network of relationships between everyday things, the artist sabotages viewers’ perceptual routines and transforms the exhibition space M2 into a place where the unexpected in the seemingly familiar emerges in an astonishing way.

The point of departure for the installation Problems and Solutions (2017) is a series of photographs with which Kathrin Sonntag documents provisional solutions to everyday problems. The artist pursues both imaginative and crude ad-hoc solutions, which she photographs in her immediate environment. The way in which Sonntag presents the series within the installation is itself only an interim solution—and its improvised character echoes the photographed subjects.

With her new work Alles in Ordnung! (2018), the artist focuses on the bizarre world of a German mail order catalogue. The three-channel slide projection combines elements of text and images into a web of absurd poetry and thus ironically examines the curious rhetoric of imperatives, which simultaneously reflects social role models and conventions.

The exhibition is curated by Andreas Fiedler.

Kathrin Sonntag (b. 1981) studied visual art at the Berlin University of the Arts from 2000 to 2006. She lives and works in Berlin. Her works are included in the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, and the collection of the Federal Republic of Germany, and are shown in exhibitions around the world, most recently at the Thomas Erben Gallery in New York ( 2017). Things Doing Their Thing is her first institutional solo exhibition in Berlin.