Kelm // Jensen // Breuer

Annette Kelm
Sergej Jensen
Wolfgang Breuer
May 3 – July 19, 2009

Auguststr. 69
10117 Berlin
Germany

www.kw-berlin.de

Annette Kelm

Annette Kelm’s photographs often display simple motifs. At first their objects appear familiar and the perspective seems ordinary and clear. The format of her images often matches the size of the real object. Photographed in front of a neutral background, the displayed objects or people look extracted, isolated and abstract. There is no horizon to situate them within any kind of context; likewise no shadows are cast. And yet, the objects look like sculptures. Light, shading, and a sense of three-dimensionality emerge solely from the image itself. Annette Kelm’s images gain their characteristic plasticity and depth from her photographic technique. In order to shoot her motifs, the artist uses middle and large format cameras, and employs light with great precision. In the darkroom she painstakingly determines the format of the image in several stages. Annette Kelm’s photographs combine a carefully hands-on production with a thoughtful process of composition.

Kelm conceptualizes the subjects of her images first without ever approaching a real motif. But, she finds the image in a slow process in which she brings about new and unfamiliar relations by interfering minimally, by composing and staging. Hats, cars, fabrics, or musical instruments look familiar and show off their traces of use. The stories and images, which her works generate within the viewer remain ambiguous. Whether staged as mass produced items or as unique copies, there is often a confusing and irritating element to the image causing the different narrative strands to cross and diverge. Following art historical rules of composition and genre—for instance classical photography at its inception—in a hardly noticable manner, Annette Kelm disarranges and rearranges seemingly familiar objects in a set of unfamiliar relations. Within her artistic practice Annette Kelm has created a self-contained photographic practice that is able to liberate itself from more recent traditions like the school of Bernd and Hilla Becher.

Annette Kelm’s (born 1975) exhibition at KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin will be her first institutional solo show in Germany.

With kind support by the Stiftung Kunstfonds

Sergej Jensen

Sergej Jensen’s reductive paintings can be defined by abstract forms and a strong materiality whilst completely revoking the painterly gesture. The artist uses linen, jute, colorful fabrics, used textiles, stretchers, and frames as supports for his works. Yet, rather than being mere base matter, these materials inform the paintings’ content. Stains, holes, cracks, and other traces of “wear and tear” become pictorial elements. Pigment, diamond dust, packthread, wool, bleach, and other conditions are Jensen’s pictorial means. Jensen applies fabric or bank notes, uses paint or chlorine bleach, does sewing and embroidery; or he hangs fabric out of the window so that it becomes patinated by rain, dust, and sun. Prolonged treatments—often over the course of several years—allow the paintings to emerge as if by themselves. The artist adds and removes, conceals and discloses. Visible traces become pictorial gestures, and pictorial gestures are made to seem like traces. Front sides reverse into backs; bottoms flip topside; and right turns left. The image itself seems to determine the composition. However, Sergej Jensen’s painting is not mimetic as it does not attempt to picture anything. Rather, his painting only represents itself.

Sergej Jensen’s (born 1973) solo exhibition at KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin will feature new works created in the last two years.

Wolfgang Breuer – Organic Food Shop

In conjunction with the credit crisis the exhibition is supposed to—and not supposed to—be like the lighting department in a hardware store, like a shop for wooden toys, and like a museum shop. (Wolfgang Breuer)

Guided by a wall, surrounded by a bottle bank: waiting at the bus stop. The snubby, berry-studded steel panel, the hackneyed containers, the empty bus stop: inside and outside become slippery categories and a precarious constellation emerges. It is on the street, in urban space, where Wolfgang Breuer finds all the materials, objects, and situations he needs. He creates subtle and condensed images by intervening in a direct and immediate, simple and quiet manner. Wolfgang Breuer adds elements to the given repetitive and additive structures. Observations and events convey a heightened sense of critical intensity as the artist has arranged them. Breuer seems to dissolve the artificiality of the exhibition space by transferring into it the social change, which occurs relentlessly throughout urban space.

Organic Food Shop, for which he has created an expansive installation work at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, is Wolfgang Breuer’s (born 1966) first institutional solo show.

Further information:
Denhart v. Harling . T +49. 30. 243459. 42 . press@kw-berlin.de