Unfreeze

UNFREEZE Noi Fuhrer, Jáno Möckel Curated by Camillo Ritter April 14 - June 25, 2023 – Kunsthaus Salzwedel Kunsthaus Salzwedel opens the new exhibition season with the exhibition UNFREEZE, which brings together two contemporary positions. Noi Fuhrer’s charcoal drawings and Jáno Möckel’s installations engage in a fantastical way with the everyday. With archeological meticulousness and poetic force, they uncover hidden layers in the familiar. Psychological as well as socio-critical qualities come to light. Möckel employs refined techniques of material alienation and Fuhrer uses an idiosyncratic contour-less drawing technique, both challenging the viewer's way of seeing. The works in UNFREEZE seem to prefer to linger on the threshold. They address in a poignant way the transition between two states - between subject and society, between rigidity and movement, between paranoia and joy. Everyday scenes and supposed trivialities begin to shine in Noi Fuhrer's large-scale charcoal drawings, gaining a sense of theatricality. The images consist exclusively of lines, which, applied in varying shades, stretch across the paper in one direction. What is depicted appears contour- less, diffused, sculptural and yet difficult to grasp. Like a blurred snapshot that, precisely because of its blurriness, is better able to capture reality than the formulated image. The empty spaces in Noi Fuhrer's pictures, the few areas without charcoal lines, literally dazzle us, and in this dazzling the potential of imagination and the chance of insight is revealed. Jáno Möckel's installations are permeated by an exciting ambiguity. At first glance, one has to smile. A plush pencil creeps up the steep slope of a trash can as if it had been brought to life; a computer mouse hangs disheveled and tangled in a cluster of cables under a flocked waiting room bench of a typical german authority. Hand-sewn letters lie scattered around the room, logos of companies and institutions are shining through their fabric. There is much to discover in Möckel's work. At the same time, the artist's apparent delight in material alienation and in the fantastic, never obscures the real and everyday adversities of life and the existential predicaments of which his works report with great urgency. For example, the scene from the work "No fear of sleep" outlined above deals with the financial indebtedness of German households. Questions of value and loss of value permeate the work, as does the driving desire of Möckel's art to defy the constraints of a consumerist order and to make the surrounding world his own. One thing stands out in Möckel's playful rapture of everyday problems: a joyful self-empowerment. And it is contagious. – Camillo Ritter