REMIX 3

The winter group exhibition presents selected works by nine artists from the gallery programme: Ronia Adl-Tabatabai, Chris Bierl, Götz Diergarten, Shin Jeong Hoon, Vincent Kück, Poppy Luley, Alina Röbke, Alexandra Sonntag and Florian Witt. The show is complemented by works by Katja von Puttkamer, who is being shown in the gallery for the first time. The exhibition ties in with the anniversary exhibitions REMIX 1 and 2, which showed a cross-section of the gallery's programme in 2023. Visitors can once again expect an exciting variety of different artistic positions. The media spectrum ranges from abstract and figurative painting to sculpture, photography and cyanotypes. The works open up different approaches and perspectives on current artistic themes and issues. In the gallery's front room Götz Diergarten shows a selection from his new serie "outside-in", in which he photographs his motifs through various types of semi-transparent glass, including grooved, ribbed, rippled, corrugated, and ornamental. The layer of glass between the camera and the subject transforms the world behind and its objects into abstract compositions of different colour fields and fragmented forms. What is depicted appears alienated – sometimes reminiscent of pointillism, other times pixelated or diffused, depending on the glass structure. A particular rarity in the presentation are two light boxes from 1994, created during Götz Diergarten’s studies at the Düsseldorf Art Academy under Bernd Becher. Each light box shows a snow-covered landscape from the Rhine-Hesse region. The strict compositions and geometric arrangement of the vines evoke the formal language of minimalist painting. The painterly effect is also enhanced by the fact that the light boxes are based on analogue 35mm slides. When enlarged, the images acquire a distinct graininess and soft blur, lending the pictures a charming vintage look, that contrasts with the crispness of digital photography. Also on view is the early work "Christmas Tree – Duchamp" from 1993, a playfull photograph showing a Christmas tree-shaped bottle dryer adorned with green bottles – an affectionate and witty homage to Marcel Duchamp’s iconic "Bottle Rack". Poppy Luley presents new, colourfully glazed ceramic sculptures, either displayed on plinths or freely distributed throughout the space. While her earlier sculptures were often inspired by playground equipment, her new works take up floral and organic forms reminiscent of flowers or mushrooms, though without being realistically identifiable. The fragile details as well as the poetic colour worlds of the glazes, which lend the sculptures a painterly quality, invite the viewer to take a closer look. Alina Röbke showcases a large-format, highly delicate cyanotype created not on traditional white paper or canvas but on orange polyester. This results in warm brown tones instead of the characteristic blue tones typically associated with the photographic process. Alina Röbke’s cyanotypes are characterized by experimentation and process: experimentation, as the outcome of exposing light-sensitive treated, or painted paper outdoors is unpredictable and only partially controllable; and process, as techniques like extended exposure or development times make the passage of time itself visible. The artist intentionally embraces the role of chance in her work, intertwining it with controlled elements. Once again, she explores the painterly potential of this photographic method. Chris Bierl presents a photograph from his series "A One Storied Country". In 2017, 2018 and 2020, the artist explored the region around the radioactively contaminated Techa River in Russia, located east of the Urals, with his camera. Chris Bierl’s photographic search for traces led him to numerous other places in the region characterized by heavy industry and environmental pollution. In his series, the artist emphasizes the devastating effects of the Anthropocene, the profound impacts and changes caused by human intervention in nature. He captures these grievances in compositions that are both aesthetically striking and poetically evocative. This interplay of beauty and devastation creates a tension that adds depth to his work, revealing its complexity only after closer and prolonged viewing. The photograph featured in the exhibition, for example, depicts a group of trees against an orange-coloured sky. A thin layer of snow covers the scenery and lends it a calm, almost poetic atmosphere. Only at second glance do the remains of a building structure emerge from behind the trees, breaking through the apparent idyll. A central theme in Alexandra Sonntag's painting is the landscape with its formations of plants and vegetation. Her paintings consistently operate at the crossroads between abstraction and figuration, characterized by a rich variety of painterly techniques. They may feature thick, coarse strokes of paint as well as smooth, polished surfaces; opaque as well as semi-transparent layers of colour, intricately detailed elements as well as quick, intuitively placed brushstrokes. The expressive gestures that run through all her works create a sense of lightness and ephemerality in her vibrant, format-filling compositions. The sculpture "flying dog" by Shin Jeong Hoon shows a travel suitcase encased in concrete with a relief of a dog embedded within it. The depiction is reminiscent of the Egyptian god Anubis, traditionally represented in the form of a dog. A subtle reference to this context is found in the suitcase’s bag tag, which lists "Cairo" as the destination. The concrete shell gives the suitcase an unexpected heaviness, rendering it unusable for its actual function. At the same time, the work plays with the idea of the dog as a loyal companion in everyday life, which in Shin Jeong Hoon’s sculpture - unlike in real life - symbolically "travels along". The combination of the unusably heavy concrete suitcase with the mythologically charged dog depiction deliberately breaks with our usual expectations. "Flying dog" invites both humorous and thought-provoking interpretations. In the gallery’s back room, further ceramics by Poppy Luley are displayed, which enter into a dialogue with new paintings by Ronia Adl-Tabatabai and a selection of works by Katja von Puttkamer. Ronia Adl-Tabatabai's work centers on an exploration of the brushstroke, which she uses as a recurring element that travels consistently through various series of works. In the works presented here, experimentation with gesso plays an important role. Traditionally intended as a primer, gesso is not merely used as a basis by Ronia Adl-Tabatabai, however, but she consciously integrates its materiality and structure into the painting. Through the application of multiple layers of gesso and paint, a richly textured surface emerges, lending the works a sense of depth. The tactile quality of these layers brings a dynamic, almost sculptural dimension to the surface and invites the viewer to explore the texture up close. The interplay between controlled brushstrokes, the materiality of the gesso and the painted layers creates a tension-filled dynamic that blurs the boundary between surface and depth. Katja von Puttkamer's paintings are dedicated to exploring urban space and the architecture of post-war modernism. Her attention is particulary drawn to grid façades, which stand out due to their clear, geometric structures, recurring forms, colours, and patterns. These façades provide her with various visual motifs, which she translates into her painting. Katja von Puttkamer deliberately isolates fragments and details from façades or urban contexts. In doing so, she focuses on motifs that are often overlooked in everyday life and may seen unspectacular – such as rhythmically arranged tiles, colourful building elements or ornamental patterns. Through her reinterpretation, she lends these supposedly banal structures a special aesthetic quality. The second room at the back contains paintings by Vincent Kück and Florian Witt. In his paintings Vincent Kück deals with the changing status of the subject in a world increasingly permeated by digital media. Vincent Kück uses an entirely abstract formal language, which means that his paintings are free of anything representational or narrative. While some are more strongly characterized by lines and geometric surfaces, in others he works out the surfaces more freely, places organic forms next to geometric or camouflage-like forms, applies new layers of paint over old ones, adds and takes away again. Layer by layer, abstract compositions emerge which, despite their two-dimensionality, are again characterized by a space of depth and thus diametrically opposed to the smooth surface of digital technology. Digital worlds have always served Florian Witt as a source of inspiration for a part of his artistic work. "Impressions of the world of computer games", says the artist, "from their beginnings to the present day, shape the breakdance of worlds of colour, paths of composition and spaces of abstraction that dance before my inner eye in the quiet phases between working actively on paintings. Many of my ideas come from it." In recent years, Florian Witt has developed an artistic position that deals in particular with the interface between the digital and analogue world. In doing so, he has found his very own, unmistakable visual language, characterised by recurring (geometric and figurative) forms and signs, which moves in the field of tension between drawn painting and painted drawing.