Jenna Bliss / Carol Rhodes

In February 2024, Haus am Waldsee presents parallel exhibitions by the American artist Jenna Bliss (b. 1984) and the Scottish painter Carol Rhodes (1959–2018). The use of temporally or spatially distanced perspectives to reveal new angles on established narratives are characteristic of both artists’ work. By combining everyday observations, speculations, and meticulous research, the two exhibitions form a space in which fact and fiction meet and the larger bearing of structural human intervention becomes tangible.

Jenna Bliss explores the political dimensions inherent in our ways of seeing and telling stories. In her practice, she primarily uses film, photography, sculpture, and collage. Her works are characterized by detailed research into often overlooked and marginal topics that nevertheless reflect major global events. Bliss employs research and intuitive associations to sift through collective memory, questions common assumptions, and thus expands an accepted narrative. For her first institutional exhibition in Germany, she brings together two of her most recent projects, which form part of a larger series of works around the recent history of Wall Street and the far-reaching consequences of high-risk financial speculation. These first two bodies of work in the series concentrate on the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the financial crash of 2008. Both events are examined in constellations of works that illuminate their subjects through a mixture of fact and fiction, abstraction and detail, drawing a wide-eyed portrait that reveals larger patterns. Through the montage of self-filmed, found, and archival footage in the form of text and images, Bliss elicits inherent ideologies from the material and reveals historical links that are invisible at first glance.

Carol Rhodes devoted her practice primarily to a type of landscape that generally receives little attention: post-industrial areas criss-crossed by landfills, airports, highways, or reservoirs that evoke the unstoppable flow of material and labour. Human activity is tangible everywhere in her images, yet people themselves do not feature. This oscillation between a diffuse presence and absence, between the supposedly recognisable and the abstract, is characteristic of Rhodes’s work. Though based on experiences and impressions of the real world, her paintings can be described as fictional syntheses composed from different sources. In addition to maps, environmental studies, or photographs from books on urban planning, geography, and geology, she also drew from own images, which she sometimes took from helicopters and airplanes. Rhodes transformed these pictures over the course of a complex painting process involving numerous sketches, drawings, and revisions. Her scenes appear both familiar and strange, everyday and yet mysterious.
The exhibition at Haus am Waldsee brings together a selection of paintings from 1993 to 2015 and includes some of the artist’s drawings, rarely exhibited during her lifetime.

Jenna Bliss is curated by Anna Gritz 
Carol Rhodes is curated by Beatrice Hilke

Upcoming in 2024

Josephine Pryde
24 May–18 August 2024

In May, Haus am Waldsee presents a comprehensive solo exhibition by Josephine Pryde (b. 1967). Throughout her working life, the currently Berlin-based British artist has explored and questioned the creation and consumption of images, with a particular focus on photography and its associated modes of production. Challenging her chosen medium, she employs a wide range of aesthetic and technical means to create works that both adapt and interrogate ideas operating through camera-generated images such as those from fashion, advertising, and science. Pryde’s exhibition at Haus am Waldsee will combine previous pieces with new work as a chance to continue these negotiations with properties of the medium, posing questions of perception as well as re-examining expectations as to how the visible may be rendered.

Curated by Beatrice Hilke

Gisèle Vienne
12 September 2024–12 January 2025

The artistic work of Gisèle Vienne (b. 1976) will be shown at the Haus am Waldsee for the first time in Berlin. Over the past twenty years, the French-Austrian artist, choreographer, and director has created a complex and idiosyncratic body of work that traces the dreams and abysses of adolescence and counterculture. Vienne’s creations, both on stage and in her visual practice, are animated by anthropomorphic figures, puppets, masks, dancers, and actors who explore the longings and fears, but also the subversive potential that lie in childhood. In the exhibition, directed as a play and developed especially for Haus am Waldsee, Vienne creates a field of tension between self-determination and heteronomy, questioning frames of perception. The exhibition is part of a collaboration between the Haus am Waldsee, the Georg Kolbe Museum, and the Sophiensæle. The three institutions bring Vienne’s work in all its complexity to Berlin as part of Art Week 2024 and present different approaches to her multifaceted practice, located between photography, sculpture and installation, film, choreography, and theatre.

Curated by Anna Gritz

Save the date
Sommerfest 2024
14 July 2024

Celebrating the height of summer, Haus am Waldsee is hosting a varied programme of performances and culinary offerings in its sculpture park. More info to be released soon on the website.

Press contact: Erik Günther, presse@hausamwaldsee.de / T +49 30 801 89 35