Lecture by Magdalena Wisniowska
29.11.2018
MUNICH
16.12.2018 – 11.01.2019
The show elements, featuring new work by Lukas Hoffmann and Andrea Zabric, is GiG Munich’s first collaboration with Klasse Pia Fries, Akademie der bildene Kunst, München. Klasse Pia Fries is well known for its focus on abstract painting, especially in its material aspect. Both Andrea Zabric, a recent graduate (2018), and Lukas Hoffmann, a student at the class, incorporate material elements in their practice, but in a strongly conceptual rather than a painterly fashion.
Carbon, aluminium, iron, copper – basic chemical elements are at play in the work, often in their purest form. These instead of being manipulated by the artist’s hand are left in their natural alien state. Matter is subject to its own internal logic not the artist’s touch, and the method of production incorporates industrial, mechanical, and printing processes. While this is obviously human in origin, technology as much a product of man as any painting, when combined with the emphasis on materiality, lends their investigations a scientific rather than artistic quality. As an attempt to think the world outside of the personal relationship we have with it, the work relates to speculative realist concerns currently present in art and philosophy. It shares with speculative realism a taste for the dogmatic, the formal and the mathematical.
Zabric’s signature pigment sculptures, quite literally, take centre stage. Painting becomes reduced to its primary components: space, ground and pigment. The pigment is not mixed with medium and spread across the ground in its customary way, but is compressed at high pressure to form unusually perfect cuboid shapes. This gives her colours an uncanny density, a new found depth that recalls the violence of its making. For GiG Munich Zabric has produced three new pieces in pigments she had not used before. The work is also more experimental than previously, in that she allows the pieces to crumble, thus exposing their innate vulnerability.
For all its implications of aggression, Hoffmann’s work is curiously invisible, scattered around the room, sometimes disguised as items of furniture. Instead of paintings, we encounter clothes hooks, a javelin is placed against the wall ready for use. Bullets (or are they exercise bars? maybe dildos?) lie waiting on the floor. The casual method of display serves to highlight the works tactile qualities, drawing us in. In a moment of masochism, we want to touch the sharp points with our fingertip and wait for the skin to break. Yet simultaneously we feel that to do so would be an imposition, we would enter a space that its not for us, that belongs to someone else, or indeed to the work itself. Quietly, the work turns away from us and withdraws into its own realm.
Magdalena Wisniowska 2018
26.11.2018 – 18.01.2019
Vernissage: Freitag 16. November, 18 – 21 Uhr,
16 November 2018 – 18 Januar 2019
Bitte nach Vereinbarung unter contact@gig-munich.com
Finissage: Freitag 18. Januar 2019, 19 – 21 Uhr
The exhibition elements, showcasing new work by Lukas Hoffmann and Andrea Zabric is GiG Munich’s first collaboration with Klasse Pia Fries, Akademie der Bildenden Künste München.
What connects the two young, upcoming artists is a shared interest in materialism, where their version of materialism belongs more to the philosophical developments centred around Speculative Realism than to the handmade, expressive variety traditionally associated with the activity of painting. Operating at the intersection of materialism and realism, they submit to the view that the primacy afforded to matter necessarily demotes the importance of the human understanding of it. If matter is all there is, then its reality must be encountered for itself. In their quasi-scientific, quasi-magical approaches, they reject the emphasis on the multiplicity of interpretations that art borrowed from dominant modes of contemporary critical theory (post-structuralism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis) in order to pursue an almost essential, almost dogmatic, grounding of reality. With this comes a violence, whether this is manifested in the high pressure Zabric submits her pigments to, or the highly polished weapon-like quality of Hoffmann’s metal work. They show that the material world, the inhuman one, is intense, forceful, elemental.
Magdalena Wisniowska 2018
as part of MCBW 2018 and supported by Bayern Design
Betti Marenko 2018
German translation of text: Spekulatives-Design_deutsch
Contract: wren_Vetrag
as part of MCBW 2018 and supported by Bayern Design
A central tenet of techno-utopianism, the desire of living outside and eventually beyond the body’s own finitude, lures us with its promise of immortality – a techno-alchemical version of the elixir of eternal life. Betti Marenko
All images courtesy of the artist.
The work Lou Jaworski shows at GiG Munich operates in a context, which could be understood in Speculative Realist terms. The “Nothing” of the exhibition title refers not so much to the sparse, almost minimal quality of the work, nor to the commonplace understanding of nihilism as the questioning of the worth of existence, but rather to the definition given by Ray Brassier. He presents nothing as a consequence of the realist conviction that there is a reality independent from us, oblivious to the values and meanings we ascribe to it. In Jaworski’s work, “nothing” is taken as a speculative opportunity, to show thinking has other interests than those circling ceaselessly around man.
For the exhibition Jaworski presents a number of small objects, all of which refer to the otherworldly – to something outside the bounds of human experience. The human hand is absent from the magnet sculpture, which has formed from its own accord. A pencil has filling made of meteorite dust, first formed together with our solar system, well before the beginning of man. These objects act as indexes for the non-relational, in that they contain elements, which we, as the thinking human subject, cannot experience. Quentin Meillassoux would describe these as “arche-fossils,” in that they contain traces, not of past life forms, but of a time prior to the emergence of life.
As such, the work welds the same power the arche-fossil has, in that it questions the kind of correlationist thinking characteristic of critical philosophy, where reality is considered never in-itself, but always in relation to us. To begin thinking reality in-itself Meillassoux proposes the principle of absolute contingency, meaning, the arbitrary and radically unpredictable of transformation of things from one moment to the next. Likewise, all the objects in the exhibition feature this radical sense of transformation. What is ever slightly so wondrous about Jaworski’s work is that one does not know where it might lead. Beyond the human, yes, but also beyond what can be expected. The gleaming structure of a display unit is disrupted by spilt water; a pencil contains traces of the early universe; gold can be found in the eye of a needle. Contingency is approaching an object and not knowing where it might take you.
Magdalena Wisniowska 2017