Contemporary art meets baroque painting
With
its narrow streets and picturesque latticework buildings, Seligenstadt,
situated close to Frankfurt, offered an ideal ambiance for Morgan to
arrange her rendezvous. The cloister forms the beginning of an art journey
through the historical city center to the gallery in the Altes Haus
, a painstakingly restored latticework building from the year 1327, where
the exhibition Dialog Skulptur with works from the Deutsche Bank
Collection was already presented in 2005.
Blind
Date Seligenstadt: a work by Sharon Lockhard in the
former
imperial bedroom of the cloisters' prelacy
Blind Date is an encounter between world images and ways of
life that have been influencing one another across temporal and spatial
boundaries and posing questions such as: How have we lived in the past?
How do we live now? How do we want to live? This is demonstrated in a
particularly cogent way in the upper story of the prelacy, where the young
African American artist Ellen
Gallagher encounters the Minimalist
art of Eva Hesse. Gallagher’s
60-part series DeLuxe is installed in glass cases before a huge
wall painting depicting a landscape. The images are based on ads from
African American magazines like Ebony,
a successful lifestyle magazine developed in 1945 expressly for the
African American market. Ebony was the first to show black models
posing next to automobiles, using special hair products, or sipping soft
drinks.
Ellen
Gallagher, from the series "DeLuxe", 2005,
SDeutsche
Bank Collection,
©Ellen
Gallagher, Courtesy the artist and
Hauser
& Wirth Zürich London
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Gallagher’s works are characterized by sly interventions,
such as the big eyes and wigs made from plasticine that she embellishes
the images with. Her ornamental visual commentaries question the past
while subverting the role models the ads propagate. Dubious clichés of
African American culture are reflected in the idealized world of the
Baroque, revealing the extent to which our concept of reality is
influenced by prevailing thought patterns.
If this interplay
between the works of art and the architecture brings an additional dynamic
into the arranged pairs of artists, then this is entirely in the spirit of
the exhibition. Blind Date is about encounters that may very well
create tension, such as the juxtaposition between Martin
Kippenberger’s figurative caricature drawings on hotel paper and Hanne
Darboven’s austere grids on graph paper. A combination of
artists that emphasizes features in each that are otherwise for the most
part overlooked: a systematic side to Kippenberger, and expressive
tendencies on the part of Darboven.
Opening
Blind Date Seligenstadt: on the left a work by Kara Walker
There
are also witty connections in Blind Date, such as the juxtaposition
of watercolors by Claudia
and Julia Müller with Sigmar
Polke’s paper works. The two sisters "sample" images of St.
Anthony from paintings by old Flemish masters, while Polke uses motifs
culled from the comic pages of old newspapers. The interchangeability of
cultural signs and the resulting confusion of terms provide the artists
with material for their humorous improvisations.
Claudia
and Julia Müller, Zwei heilige Antoniusse
(Marten
de Voss und Pieter Brueghel der Jüngere), 2004,
Deutsche
Bank Collection
|
© courtesy the artists & Peter
Kilchmann Gallery, Zurich
|
But Blind Date also sets up meetings between artists
whose difference in age would have prevented them from ever encountering
one another. One example of this are Markus
Amm’s abstract photographic works, which are placed in reference
to the photograms of László
Moholy-Nagy. Three of the Bauhaus
artist’s photographs can be seen in Seligenstadt that demonstrate his
preference for unusual image crops. Photographed from a bird’s eye view,
dominant diagonals turn his city views into abstract compositions.
Opening
Blind Date Seligenstadt:
one of
the rooms of the prelacy
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