Tag: installation

Low Affinity

Johanna Strobel

14.10-14.11.2021

 

 

Johanna Strobel, Low Affinity, 2021, installation view

Johanna Strobel, Low Affinity, 2021, installation view

Johanna Strobel, Low Affinity, 2021, installation view

Johanna Strobel, Low Affinity, 2021, installation view

Johanna Strobel, Low Affinity, 2021, installation view

Johanna Strobel, deep connectedness, 2021, usb 2.0 extension cords, paraffin, LEDs, plugs, size variable

Johanna Strobel, deep connectedness, 2021, USB 2.0 extension cords, paraffin, LEDs, plugs, size variable (detail)

Johanna Strobel, Low Affinity, 2021, installation view

 Johanna Strobel, low affinity (blue), 2021, USB 2.0 extension cords, paraffin, LEDs, size variable, approx 200 x 30 x 30 cm

Johanna Strobel, low affinity (blue), 2021, USB 2.0 extension cords, paraffin, LEDs, size variable, approx 200 x 30 x 30 cm, (detail)

 Johanna Strobel, low affinity (white), 2021,  USB 2.0 extension cable, paraffin, LEDs, size variable, approx 200 x 35 x 35 cm (detail)

Johanna Strobel, low affinity (red), 2021, USB 2.0 extension cable, paraffin, LEDs, size variable, approx 200 x 30 x 30 cm (detail)

 Johanna Strobel, the duration of the present (red/blue), 2021, oil on wood, microcontroller, minimotors, acrylic mirror, USB cable, plug, 30 x 20 x 20 cm

 Johanna Strobel, false friends,2021, acrylic mirrors, glass, aluminum, clockworks (clockwise and counterclockwise), LEDs, USB cable, each approx. 25 x 25 x 5 cm 

 Johanna Strobel, figures, 2021, oil on wood, microcontroller, motion sensor, USB cable, LEDs, plug, acrylic mirror, rubber bands, 30.5 x 46 x 10 cm

 

 

 

The word ‘plane’ conjures up an image of a brightly lit field, on which everything and anything may stand.The field in this image is squarish, with a mathematical axis, ‘x’ cutting one way, ‘y’ the other, and ‘z’ upwards and downwards, together mapping out a grid with each thing in its own little box. To make connections between things we draw (mostly) straight lines, from one point to another.

Deleuze and Guattari would argue that we have this image of the plane because of the link between ‘plane’ and ‘plan’. When we think of a plane this way, it acts as a hidden principle.We may not see the grid itself, but the grid is what makes things visible to us. It causes the given to be given by giving things their structure, organising them, charting their development and growth. It is a plan(e) of organisation and development, a genetic plan(e) of evolution. Because we do not see the principles by which it organises things, only the result of its labours, the plane is transcendent to us and things, and likened to an idea in the mind of God.

For us the viewers, marked as we are by the ‘confirmation and selection bias’ and victim to the ‘clustering illusion’ we look for these hidden principles finding patterns where there are none, making connections between things that are not in any way related. One such idea is central to the work Johanna Strobel shows at GiG Munich, the idea of aether, the fifth element of a classical world of four, in which everything can be divided into fire, earth, air and water. It was used to explain how stars stayed up in the sky, and moved across the heavens.

But there is another idea of a plane, in and on which there is no form or structure, only activity and its lack.This plane is populated by sub-atomic particles always in the process of transformation, but with no specific aim in mind. Depending on their activity, their speed and slowness, they compose assemblages, as Deleuze and Guattari write, ‘compositions of speed’. But they do not develop, organise according to a principle.They connect, disconnect, transform, reform.What happens, happens, in endless proliferation. Instead of development there is constant dissolution.

Johanna Strobel’s work conjures up both plan(e)s.There is a longing for principle, apparent in her systematic approach, plug going into socket, light being red or blue, going on or off.We can map this world quite easily on a grid. It is clean, white, metallic.There is also the understanding of a far more dissolute world in which entropy rules, of information lost through USB cables and mnemonic devices of knot-making failing.This world is unstable, reckless, and somehow also inexplicably present.

 

 

 

Plastique Fantastique

Zero Time

30.11.2019 – 17.01.2020

 

plastique postcard front

 

Opening: Saturday 30th of November, 7-9 pm

performance: 8pm

 

Trouble… Trouble on the ground… Extinction Beckons… Many disappear… But you survive…  Tech-animals are resourceful… Some stay with the trouble on the ground and find new ways of living… Many live in Zero City, which is not a place but an artilect intelligence, and sign up to zero production, zero consumption, zero-hours contracts… Material life becomes minimal but profitable at least for some… information is Deliver00’d in zero time… Others see a future off-ground and look to the sky… higher than the clouds, higher than where blue turns to fire, higher than darkness… to the Moon, Mars and beyond… banking on artilect and intelligence to build a city on Mars… but artilects have ideas of their own and… and make for Mars on their own, for a friend’s rendezvous… a society of a kind… so begins the first day of Mars Year Zero…

Through drawing, digital prints, sculpture, film and performance, the London-based collective Plastique Fantastique address what was once Science Fiction but now material for the news, the choice of finding ways of living with the trouble on Earth or pursuing off-world futures. In Zero Time, Plastique Fantastique tell the tales of those who choose to remain and those who look to leave, and also those who have no choice but to flee to find safe haven. Zero Time incorporates work from two recent exhibitions in London, part one Zero City at IMT Gallery, and part two, Mars Year Zero at Dilston Gallery, SPG. For the opening of the show, The group will perform a sonic fiction ‘We Live by the Left Hand of Darkness,’ about the first days of Mars Year Zero.

 Recent exhibitions and performances by Plastique Fantastique include: Mars Year Zero Dilston Gallery, SPG London 2019; Mars Year Zero Performance for ‘Today is Our Tomorrow’, Publics Helsinki 2019; Zero City IMT Gallery London 2019; ‘Shonky’, Hayward Touring Show travelling to MAC Belfast, DCA Dundee, Bury Art Gallery and Museum 2017-18; ‘They Call Us Screamers’, TULCA Galway.

 

Mit Zeichnungen, Digitaldrucken, Skulpturen, Filmen und Performances spricht das Londoner Kollektiv Plastique Fantastique die aus Science Fiction bekannte Frage an, ob man auf einer unruhigen Erde bleiben oder eine Zukunft außerhalb der Welt verfolgen soll. In Zero Time erzählt Plastique Fantastique die Geschichten von denen, die bleiben und die gehen wollen, und auch von denen, die keine andere Wahl haben als zu fliehen. Zero Time enthält Arbeiten aus zwei kürzlich in London durchgeführten Ausstellungen, Teil 1: Zero City in der IMT Gallery und Teil 2: Mars Year Zero in der Dilston Gallery, SPG. Zur Eröffnung der Ausstellung wird die Gruppe eine Sonic-Fiktion über die ersten Tage des Marsjahres Null “We Live by the Left Hand of Darknesst” inszenieren.

Zu den jüngsten Ausstellungen und Performances von Plastique Fantastique gehören: Mars Year Zero Dilston Gallery, SPG London 2019; Mars Year Zero Performance für „Today is Our Tomorrow“, Publics Helsinki 2019; Zero City IMT Gallery London 2019; “Shonky”, Hayward Wanderausstellung zu MAC Belfast, DCA Dundee, der Bury Art Gallery und dem Museum 2017-18; “They Call Us Screamers”, TULCA Galway.

 

 

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Susanne Wagner

Angelina

 

 

Angelina 2

Eröffnung: Mittwoch 28. März, 18- 21 Uhr

Ausstellungsdauer: 29. März – 11. Mai 2018

Öffnungszeiten: Montag – Donnerstag, 15 – 18 Uhr

Bitte nach Vereinbarung unter contact@gig-munich.com

 

 

GiG Munich is excited to present the new, site-specific floor installation “Angelina” by German artist, Susanne Wagner.

 

Best known for her video work, Wagner’s current practice has shifted towards sculpture and now involves the use of ceramics in the production of large-scale modular pieces, often juxtaposed with representations of the female body.  While the new work addresses themes of repetition and originality, it also complicates the postmodernist narrative by showing how repetition participates in the cultural construction of sex, gender and the body as ‘original’ because ‘natural’ foundations of identity.

 

With their upward facing breasts, the repeated floor elements of “Angelina” aim (quite literally) to bring to relief the power structures responsible for our assumptions about gender, in an up-to-date tabloid context of Angelina Jolie’s mastectomy, Emma Watson’s feminism-lite and ♯MeToo Twitter activism.

Robin Mason

Constellation : Konstellation, 2.02 – 2.03.2018

 

5Robin Mason, Constellation : Konstellation, 2018, installation view

 

6Robin Mason, Constellation : Konstellation, 2018, installation view

 

_MG_9017Robin Mason, Collection, acrylic on paper, approx. 650 x 320 cm. Photo courtesy of Johannes Wende.

 

_MG_9034Robin Mason, Threshold, 2017, acrylic on paper, 175 x 240 cm and Black Forest Lake, 2017, acrylic on paper, four wineglasses, 65 x 42 x 15 cm. Photo courtesy of Johannes Wende.

 

4 (2)Robin Mason, Constellation : Konstellation, 2018, installation view

 

3 (1)Robin Mason, Constellation : Konstellation, 2018, installation view

 

2 (1)Robin Mason, Constellation : Konstellation, 2018, installation view

 

As so often with Robin Mason’s work, what first strikes the unaware visitor is its sheer exuberance. The busy installation of works on paper, drawings, paintings and sculpture that is made specifically for GiG Munich, is no different. We enter to a riot of colour, where vibrant oranges, acid yellows, baby pinks and sky blues all vie for our attention. Where there is no colour, a mass of lines takes over, forming waves and swirly patterns – dots and dashes cover any spare surface. Anthropomorphic forms rise up from the ground and grow through and between other forms, twisting around open books or vignettes that give us little views to somewhere else, tree covered landscapes, doorways, windows, more flowers and plants. Pierced by arrows or covered by cloth these forms have an erotic language of their own, some phallic, some clearly female in their appearance. Just when it seems we are able to find some familiar ground, the scale shifts suddenly. Large forms become small and things far away, close by. We find the night sky, reduced in its vastness, low down on the floor, its image only visible from behind and in a mirror.

The work’s exuberance is combined with so many references that it is easy to lose track. Some of these, like those to kitschy Bavarian souvenirs or to the Isenheim Alterpiece, would be familiar to a German audience, others are known to the artist only. Speaking to Mason one hears stories of earlier trips to Germany, of towns visited because of a book once read, of the disappointment of finding the Black Forest, not black but green, and of glasses, all four from a set, that belonged to his parents. The direct reference for the show is the 1609 painting Flight to Egypt by Adam Elsheimer, considered to be the first accurate depiction of the night sky in the Renaissance period.

Hovering above the exhibition is what could be seen as the eye of God and this is perhaps our entry point into the work. For God here, despite the numerous references to North European Christianity, is a Dionysian God, presiding over a world of the will to power, a world of forces and affects, and of the various powers that make up Life. That libidinal drives, both positive and negative, are at work in Mason’s practice is a fact acknowledged by other commentators, who noted that the pleasure apparent in Mason’s paintings tends to give way to feelings of anxiety and dread. I would say that in this exhibition, we enter a sphere in which each element casts influence on another, again positive and negative.   But the trick that Mason conveys so well is of affirmation. As Spinoza, Nietzsche and Deleuze have shown, to affirm brings joy and joy brings us closer to God. In this way, the “constellation” of the title stands for as much the night sky as for the crown of stars, the Corona Borealis, which Dionysus gifted Ariadne and tossed into the heavens.

Magdalena Wisniowska 2018

Constellation Saaltext1

STEFAN LENHART, fruits of the dawn, first pictures and press release

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The landscape Stefan Lenhart constructed for GiG Munich could be described as a landscape of the mind. There is a path winding down the middle of the room, lit up on either side by brightly coloured lamps. The path leads up to a large mirror, which is framed by white acrylic columns. We see that the lights are also made of a similar acrylic material, painter’s palettes, that the artist cut up and then reassembled into a jagged spiral shape. The wall to the right is papered over, covered by large printouts of the same painter’s palettes in close-up. Dotted around are small, abstract paintings.

To go down the path marked out for us is to follow a narrative. We are asked to wonder down the length of the room, to pause at the points of interest, and then to stop when confronted with our own reflection and the room behind us. The random patterns on the lamps, the paintings and the posters are designed to capture our attention and allow our mind to drift.

The work has surrealist qualities, in that it shares surrealism’s interest in psychoanalytic concepts – like the unconscious or the expressive power of dreams. It lends itself to André Breton’s definition of surrealism as psychic automatism, as it incorporates into its structure the two means for capturing psychic processes: automatic writing and the irrational narrative of the dream. The uncontrolled production of Stefan Lenhart palette paintings is comparable to the meandering lines of Masson’s automatic drawings; the physical landscape Lenhart constructs, dreamlike, full of symbolism waiting to be uncovered.

But “fruits of the dawn” should not be seen as a historical anachronism. As much as the work shares surrealism’s interest in psychoanalytic concepts, it is very much post-Freudian, anti-oedipal in the sense of Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Stefan Lenhart sets up a surrealist narrative in order to disrupt it. He shows its version of the unconscious is as tightly constructed as the controlled, conscious domain of reason. So the path we are meant to follow, is broken up; the lamps, instead of guiding us, distract and frustrate, providing insufficient light to see the paintings; and the destination too, the large mirror in which we see our reflections, is a kind of dead end. All we can do is turn around and walk back.

As the random configurations of paint on the wall and on the lights signal, to step onto the path Stefan Lenhart sets out for us is to enter a very different kind of unconscious space, one that Deleuze would compare to Murphy’s mind, Murphy being the central protagonist of Beckett’s same-titled 1936 novel. When the preconceptions constraining our understanding of the unconscious, are done away, nothing other than the “darkness of absolute freedom” remains. Here forms are in continual flux – commotion – with no principle to guide their actions. Through this ever-changing darkness, we can only travel, mere motes or points on the “ceaseless unconditioned generation and passing away of line.”

Magdalena Wisniowska 2016

STEFAN LENHART, fruits of the dawn

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Eröffnung: Freitag 9. December 2016, 18:00-21:00 Uhr

Austellungdauer: 9 December 2016 – 13 Januar 2017

Finissage: Freitag 13. Januar 2017, 8:00-21:00 Uhr

GiG Munich is happy to present “fruits of the dawn,” the latest installation by Munich based artist and curator, Stefan Lenhart .

Stefan Lenhart, born 1969, graduated from the Academy of Fine Art, Munich in 2007. Since then, he has exhibited widely in Germany and abroad, most recently “Anthophobia” at the Artothek, Munich, 2016. The extensive catalogue “M.A.D.” of his work was published by Distanz in  2012. He is also founder of the project space, “Tanzschule projects” which ran from 2007-2012.

His work consists of large-scale installations that use references to the historical avant-garde – modernism and surrealism – to produce new meaning. Taking a holistic approach, he combines painting, sculpture and other modes of presentation in ways that are simultaneously theatrical and conceptual, unexpected and strange.

At GiG Munich, Stefan Lenhart presents a new series of light pieces. Constructed out of  used painter’s palettes, cut and arranged in the same asymmetric spiral shape, this new work plays with ideas of order, chance, destruction and creation.

MICHAEL LUKAS occupied corner – opening soon!

reminder

Eröffnung: Samstag, den 18. Juni 2016 um 15:00 Uhr

Einführung: Dr. Magdalena Wisniowska

Ausstellungsdauer: 18. Juni – 26. Juli 2016

Öffnungszeiten: Montag – Donnerstag 15:00 – 18:00 Uhr und nach Vereinbarung unter: gigmunich@gmail.com

 

 Occupied Corner ist die neueste raumbezogene Arbeit von Michael Lukas, die er speziell für GIG Munich gestaltet. Die Installation ist eine fließende geometrische Konstruktion von Beziehungen, Verbindungen und Netzwerken, in der sich die einzelnen Elemente in ständiger Spannung befinden. In ihr vereint er Gemälde, Skulpturen und Zeichnungen, um unsere Rolle im größeren Zusammenhang einer globalen Landschaft zu untersuchen.

Der etablierte Münchner Künstler mit zahlreichen Einzel- und Gruppenausstellungen arbeitet auch als Kurator. Er organisierte Ausstellungen mit internationaler Besetzung u.a. in München den Weltkongress für Kartographie 2006 und in Berlin die von der Kulturstiftung des Bundes geförderte Ausstellung Luise. Die Inselwelt der Königin 2010. 

 

Occupied Corner is the latest art installation by Michael Lukas, made specifically for the GiG Munich site. The installation constructs a fluid geometry of relations, connections and networks, its different elements held in continual tension. Incorporating painting, sculpture, and drawing, it critically examines our place within a larger global landscape.

Michael Lukas is a well-established Munich artist, with numerous solo and group exhibitions. He has also worked as a curator, most notably organising the World Congress for Cartography in 2006 and the Berlin exhibition, Luise Die Inselwelt der Königin in 2010.