Aperture

“Aperture” is bringing together seven positions at the start of the year 2025, whose coherence results equally from connections and contrasts on a formal and thematic level. With a selection of artists, some of whom we have been working with for a long time and some of whom we have worked with recently, we offer an insight into our current orientation. Marc Botschen’s new etchings are part of his „Soft Pass“ series, in which he uses the method of composite photography to extract and create new images from an historical document, his great-grandfathers „Ahnenpass“. For these etchings, he is working these images with acid on aluminum and thereby exposing the metal to high temperatures. The works in the overall series, in which he has also worked with foliation, further photography and woodcuts, activate and exploit an object that once constituted the most consequential form of identity creation we know of. Vicente Hirmas creates emotional connections between objects, materials and their functions. He works on his paintings and sculptures using elaborate manual processes and consciously opposes a more technical approach. This methodology leads to a form of embodied knowledge that connects thought and action. His artistic practice focuses on the process itself and incorporates various crafts such as carpentry, goldsmithing, sewing, painting and restoration. Through the use of these production techniques, different aesthetics are woven together to create a unique fabric. „With his sculptural work, Nino Maaskola reflects on the most basic conditions of artistic production, a fundamental research which negotiates questions of formation in its relationship to aspects of process and materiality. At the same time, artistic production as production becomes thematic here. With it, the aspect of “work“ is called up as a social phenomenon: in its connection back to relations of production and economic structures, but also as a phenomenon that has become embedded in the globe itself and thus again evokes questions of materiality and production.“ (Sebastian Hammerschmidt: Exhibition text „Mount Petrol“, 2023) „With an entire arsenal of found and collected fabrics in reserve, Schmitz demonstrates how production and circulation in contemporary art form one and the same process. The origin of these found and collected items thus becomes a fleeting memory, merging into the respective work, serving as both a trace of former use and a part of an independent sculptural logic. In doing so, the unity of the objects is guaranteed through different, nevertheless mainly textile techniques: folding, stretching, knotting, draping.” (Sebastian Hammerschmidt: Exhibition text „Trinkets on Trellis“, 2024) Anna Stüdeli‘s works reveal an intensive examination of the phenomenon of advertising posters in an urban context. By photographing sections of these posters and then processing them into collages, Stüdeli not only captures the visual diversity of the urban environment, but also analyzes the interactions of passers-by with these very posters. These observations flow directly into her artistic practice and lend her works an authentic and socio-critical dimension. Johanna Wagner is a visual artist and works with film, photography, performance and installation. Her interest in theatrical stage sets, which brought her to art, is reflected in her diverse practice. Wagner‘s photography series often consist of self-portraits, which she takes with a self-timer and bright flash. The human body in interaction with certain materials often plays a major role as a starting point. Currently, these materials mostly originate from the heterotopia of the garden - on a poetic level, but also on an ecological and botanical one. “Emil Walde creates new spaces of perception by appropriating existing materials and situations and transforming them into more general contexts. He sensitizes our gaze and exposes illusionary mechanisms in order to successively give rise to new mental potentials. His works do not describe contemplative images in the classic viewing moment, they function constructively. His interventions sharpen our perception and describe stereotypical conditions of sociocultural places, only to counteract them at the same moment.” (Luisa Rittershaus: Young Artists, Emil Walde, Wienand Verlag Köln, 2022)