Luca Vitone
Imperium
20 September–9 November 2014
Katharina Grosse
n.b.k. Showroom
20 September–7 November 2014
Opening: Friday 19 September, 7pm
Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.)
Chausseestraße 128 / 129
10115 Berlin
Germany
Hours: Tuesday–Sunday noon–6 pm,
Thursday noon–8 pm
www.nbk.org
Luca Vitone
Imperium
Since the second half of the 1980s, in his artistic work Luca Vitone engages with the notion of the construction and representation of specific locations and the different languages that describe and define these places in their geographical, political, social, cultural and poetic dimensions. In particular, he is interested in how places are characterized through art, cartography, music, food, political groupings and ethnic minorities. Many of his installations can be understood as mental landscapes that were created from locally found remnants of civilization (dust, waste, food).
For Imperium, his solo exhibition at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Luca Vitone has created a new series of four watercolors made from dust [Räume (Rooms), 2014], representing different institutions of state power: the economic [Deutsche Bundesbank (German Federal Bank), Frankfurt/Main], the legislative [Deutscher Bundestag (German Parliament), Berlin], the judiciary [Bundesgerichtshof (German Federal Court), Karlsruhe] and the cultural (Pergamonmuseum, Berlin). The monochrome “portraits” are painted on paper with the dust of the respective places. Furthermore, Vitone developed a new olfactory sculpture, Imperium (2014), receiving the visitors when entering the otherwise empty exhibition space. The sculpture is composed of different fragrances, which together evoke the “smell of power.” For this work, the artist again collaborated with the master perfumer Maria Candida Gentile, just as for his contribution to the Italian Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale.
Curated by Marius Babias
Katharina Grosse
n.b.k. Showroom
Katharina Grosse has become internationally known for her large, spatially expansive paintings that open a space for the paint to transgress the usual pictorial dimensions. In the n.b.k. Showroom, she presents a new work that refers to the premises of her specific painterly concept since the late 1990s, and at the same time complementing it with the complexity of the artistic approaches that have developed in her work since: the experience of color and a critical reflection of space.
Program
Blick zurück nach vorn – Künstler über Deutschland (Looking back into the Future – Artists on Germany)
Thursday, 25 September, 7pm
Premiere screening* and discussion with Cornelia Schleime (artist), Maria Anna Tappeiner (filmmaker) and Karin Thomas (art critic), moderated by Kolja Reichert (art critic)
Script and direction: Maria Anna Tappeiner
A co-production between TAG/TRAUM on behalf of ZDF in collaboration with ARTE
Germany 2014, 54 minutes
With the artists Katharina Sieverding, Joseph Beuys, Gerhard Richter, Thomas Demand, Jörg Immendorff, Thomas Kilpper, Cornelia Schleime, Dan Perjovschi, Christoph Schlingensief, Olafur Eliasson, the curators Klaus Biesenbach, Andreas Kaernbach, Susanne Gaensheimer, Udo Kittelmann, and the art critic Karin Thomas.
* Broadcast date on ARTE: Wednesday October 1, 9:55pm
“Materien der Macht. Konstituierende Prozesse und präsentische Demokratie” (Matters of Power. Constituting Processes and present time Democracy)
Thursday 2 October, 7pm
Lecture by Isabell Lorey (political scientist, Visiting Professor of Political Theory, Center for Gender Studies, University of Basel)
“Die Macht der Einladung und die Ambivalenz des Generösen” (The Power of the Invitation and the Ambivalence of the Generous)
Thursday 16 October, 7pm
Lecture by Beatrice von Bismarck (art historian, curator, Professor of Art History and Visual Studies, Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig)
“Konzeptuelle Kunst: Von genuin zu Genre” (Conceptual Art: from genuine to Genre)
Thursday 23 October, 7pm
Lecture by Julian Heynen (art historian, curator, Artistic Director at large, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf)
Lectures and screening/discussion in German language
Italian Harp Music from the 17th Century
Sunday 9 November, 8pm
Concert with Loredana Gintoli, Baroque double harp
