FS.Art, Berlin
where are we now
opening: 25. April 2018, 19:00 - 21:00 h
26. April - 8. July 2018
curated by Friederike Nymphius
Lothar Hempel, Gregor Hildebrandt,
Bernhard Martin, Gerold Miller
On the occasion of Gallery Weekend 2018 and opening on March 25, FS.ART is pleased to present the exhibition where are we now, curated by Friederike Nymphius featuring Berlin based artists Lothar Hempel, Gregor Hildebrandt, Bernhard Martin and Gerold Miller. where are we now is a reference to the eponymous song by David Bowie, released in 2013. The ballad, presented by Bowie in a broken voice, describes the artist’s special relationship to the city of Berlin. The city he encountered in the 1970s is no longer there: the fall of the Wall and the ensuing „hype” that swept over Berlin have changed it in no time. Places such as Potsdamer Platz in particular are no longer what they used to be. Much as Bowie’s song, the exhibition examines the world as a place of constant change, a place where one permanently needs to reorient and re-invent oneself.
New knowledge, new images spread within seconds, like a tsunami. Even the smallest piece of information disseminates in no time throughout the world. Nothing stays secret. Boundaries blur. Where does „privacy” end? And where does the public space begin? What do we want? Where do we stand? The four artists selected for the show, each in their individual practice, represent a world in which old values have become increasinlgy irrelevant and the contextualization of the self appears more and more complicated. The restlessness of daily life and an ever-changing environment provide for no stability. Many of the works in the exhibition oscillate between construction and de-construction, reflecting on the forced constant reorientation and re-definition of the self.
Art and culture mirror these profound social changes with their own means: Artists reject the old canon and create their own ideas for a world. Gregor Hildebrandt and Gerold Miller, with subtile critique, tie into the geometric-abstract idiom of the early twentieth-century avantgardes. While Gregor Hildebrandt, by means of audiotapes, re-works music into images and spaces of commemoration, Gerold Miller in works that are deeply rooted in the present age leads us to confront the interface of real and simulated space. Alongside these positions stand Lothar Hempel and Bernhard Martin. Committed to a figurative idiom, they explore the fragility of their/our world in both a poetic and ironic way, asking the ever-existential question of „whereto?” A fundamental curatorial element of the show is to confront a formally reduced vocabulary with an expressive-figurative language in such a way as to produce from the collision a different visual experience for each of us. The overall image that Where are we now intends to frame is fragmentary and not absolut. As a concept the exhibition means to make transparent how contemporary artists, against the backdrop of constant change, develop their own „visions” of the here and now in our world. The resulting prespectives are not always new, but still surprising. As long as the sun shines....
Dr. Friederike Nymphius, 2018
FS.ART
Potsdamer Str. 102
107895 Berlin
T +49-30-44356657
www.fs-art.de.
