Natalie Czech
I cannot repeat what I hear
Until September 1, 2013
Nathan Hylden
Meanwhile
Until September 15, 2013
Der Kunstverein, since 1817.
Klosterwall 23
20095 Hamburg
The photographic works of Natalie Czech (b. 1976, lives in Berlin) oscillate between concrete poetry and conceptual photography. She highlights the relationships and interactions between images and texts, poetry and the visual arts whilst also exploring the lyrical potential that lays hidden in newspaper articles and books. For her new series “Poems by Repetition,” she singled out existing poems by Aram Saroyan, Hart Crane, Allen Ginsberg, Gertrude Stein and others, which are characterized by the rhetorical device of repetition. These poems only become completely visible and readable in the repeated depiction of the same photographed text material and its serialization as a group. Czech’s visual motifs draw on different media, such as magazines, record covers, books, iPads and Kindle readers. Her painstakingly researched and selected textual fragments (a film review, a set of dance instructions, an essay on the significance of record-cover design for the marketing of music, for example) make reference to both the poem in question and to music. Repeatedly photographing the same texts produces stylistic variations such as minimal shifts in frame and perspective, altered exposure times and the juxtaposition of different resolutions. The photographs are also taken at various times of day, using similar techniques of repetition to those adopted by the writer of the respective poem. The works portray an “allegory of writing” through the complex interaction of meaning, repetition and variation.
The starting point of the current series of Nathan Hylden (b. 1978, lives in Los Angeles) is a photograph of the artist’s studio. It shows the silhouettes of various objects and pieces of furniture that belong to the place but have now been specially arranged and staged. Hylden silk-screened the photograph onto ten equally large, thin aluminum panels, minimally displacing the motif each time. The surfaces were then roughly painted in varying order, stacked on top of each other and treated with acrylic paint. This superimposition gave rise to visible traces of the neighboring panels, which indexically refer to one another and indicate the presence of other pictures. Each image has a predecessor and a successor, and is part of what seems like a never ending process of production. Hylden arranges the silver-grey and red works in such a way that the shadow play from his studio appears on the walls of the exhibition space: wall once again becomes wall. The working situation of his studio becomes a part of the exhibition as a painting; the site of production becomes that of presentation. This intermingles two separate areas and brings about the depiction of an original. For the viewer the series of aluminium panels becomes a cinematic sequence, in which the wandering silhouettes portray the passing of time. In these works, Hylden synchronizes time and space, addresses the conditions and possibilities of painting, and experiments with various carrier media and how they interact with different layers of paint.