Günther Förg, Keren Cytter,
and Collector’s Room #1
January 20–March 3 2013
Deweer Gallery
Tiegemstraat 6A
8553 Otegem
Belgium
Room II
Günther Förg
The Double Dream of Spring
Günther Förg was born in Füssen, Germany, in 1952. He lives and works in Colombier, Switzerland, and Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany, and is worldwide recognized as one of the most important abstract painters of the past 30 years.
Günther Förg paints monochrome or mixed compositions with pure colours that range from very rigorous, to organized, to more lyrical. Förg paints both on classical carriers such as paper, wood panel, and (prepared) canvas, and on unusual materials such as lead and copper. The painting of Günther Förg is obviously reminiscent of the modernism of the architecture, urbanism, and art that precede him. Günther Förg has succeeded in critically evaluating the aspirations, achievements and shortcomings of modernism and elaborating upon them. Förg masterfully showcases the essence of colour, the importance of the gesture that makes the colour sensation possible, the influence and possibilities of the carrier, the various possibilities of the form that develops within a given format, and finally his own creativity and virtuosity, in the way he creates, within these minimal boundaries, aesthetically haunting paintings.
Günther Förg’s third solo exhibition at Deweer Gallery renders an excellent idea of the artistic aspirations of the artist. It consists of three large elements: an important series of monotypes, a large number of pastel drawings (so-called Dot Images) and a monumental monochrome wall painting. By painting one wall of the exhibition room into a monochrome wall painting, Förg links the spatial environment of the exhibition and the spatiality of that specific colour to the pictorial story that is being told by his works.
Room III
Keren Cytter
Tutorial
Keren Cytter was born in Tel Aviv, Israel, in 1977. She lives and works in New York.
Keren Cytter is a video artist, filmmaker and writer. With her narrative yet radically experimental videos, made quickly and with few resources, which she also writes, films and edits herself, Keren Cytter is now recognized as an artist who has radically innovated and expanded the language of the medium.
For this first solo show at Deweer Gallery, Keren Cytter brings together four recent video works, giving the visitor an insight into various aspects of her film practice, and two series of drawings. In Video Art Manual, a work from 2011 that takes a somewhat special place in her oeuvre, Cytter focuses on how contemporary video art could or should be made. The video reads as an ironic, misleading manual, while ambiguously revealing some artistic preoccupations Cytter deals with in her other video works. In Der Spiegel from 2007, Cytter makes use of a ‘choir’ technique—which originated in ancient Greek drama and consists of a live, on-stage comment on the action by a group of choir members—to enhance the narrative potential of a short story and to experiment with the traditional parameters of filmed storytelling. In Der Spiegel, the choir revolts and takes control over the action, overruling the dominant role of the main actors. For Untitled, filmed in front of live audiences at the Hebbel Theatre in Berlin and produced for the 2009 Venice Bieniale, Cytter was inspired by Casavetes’ film Opening Night. She worked with both professional and amateur actors and used several cameras close to the action, causing the viewer to feel submersed in the psychological interactions of the actors. The Hottest Day of the Year, made in 2010, refers to the tradition of the romantic anthropological documentary. The work of directors Chris Marker and Trinh T. Minh-ha was influential here: in their documentaries, both directors were concerned with colonialism, and intermingled real and fictional elements with philosophical and sociological comments. The drawings in Tutorial are a series of preparatory sketches for Untitled and a series of four new drawings.
Room I
Collector’s Room #1
Group show with works by a.o. Michaël Aerts, Stephan Balkenhol, Sergey Bratkov, Tony Cragg, Jan De Cock, Jan Fabre, Tatjana Gerhard, Benjamin Moravec, Koen Vanmechelen, Jorinde Voigt and Norbert Witzgall.