Michael Pfrommer and Adrian Williams
Opening:
23 September 2011, 8pm
Press preview:
23 September 2011, 11am
Alte Brücke 2 / Maininsel
60594 Frankfurt am Main
www.portikus.de
Michael Pfrommer’s paintings and drawings speak of mystical universes. His motifs grow out of everyday impressions from his immediate surroundings as well as from his friends and family. He recalls fragments from films, pieces of music, song lyrics, and picture stories, knitting them together in forever new ways in order to capture moments that strike him as significant. The results vary, from disfigured self-portraits and bizarre comic strip characters to bleak or lifeless landscapes and subtly delineated still lifes. Pfrommer’s pictures reveal his fascination with painters such as Bernard Buffet, James Ensor, and Francisco de Goya, whose somber and often macabre pictures are profoundly unsettling depictions of human and psychological states. Pfrommer’s particular talent is to face the frequently abysmal conditions he sees—be they social or personal—with great subtlety and a grain of humor. Repetition, coupled with restless insistence, is a central feature of Pfrommer’s work. The exhibition presents his work in unprecedented breadth in order to highlight its complexity.
Adrian Williams’s new work occupies the temporary upper floor at Portikus. Both the acoustic conditions and the intimate room with the staircase, the wooden flooring, and the views of the city provide an ideal setting for Adrian Williams’s carefully planned performances. In the exhibition at the Portikus, the piece, which is subdivided into several chapters, will be subject to ongoing elaboration over the entire duration of the exhibition; the artist will work with the participating musicians and actors and perform once every week. During the opening hours, the instruments, sound objects, microphones, speakers, pieces of furniture, etc. that Adrian Williams has assembled into a stage design like installation will serve the artist and her team as a public rehearsal space. The entire intermediate ceiling is thus transformed into a voluminous sounding body transmitting voices and sounds to the lower exhibition space.
Although Adrian Williams’s work may at first glance seem to be the formal opposite of Michael Pfrommer’s paintings, there are several parallels: here, too, observations from wondrous universes appear; fantastic and mysterious stories, enigmatic encounters, and strange moods. Like Pfrommer, she sketches the contours of characters everyone can read in their own way. And Williams, too, relies on repetition and doubling, of selected sounds or words, for instance, which persistently reappear throughout a piece to transport the listener back to a particular place. The “divided proximity” between the two oeuvres enabled by the spatial configuration at Portikus helps to highlight each artist’s unaffected engagement with the other’s work, but also the ways they directly influence certain processes and artistic decisions.
A catalogue will be published in conjunction with the exhibition. An artist’s edition by Michael Pfrommer will also be available.
Performances by Adrian Williams:
Wednesday, September 28, 7pm
Wednesday, October 5, 7pm
Wednesday, October 12, 7pm
Wednesday, October 26, 7pm
Wednesday, November 2, 7pm
Made possible by: Stiftung Polytechnische Gesellschaft, Frankfurt am Main
Director: Nikolaus Hirsch
Curator: Sophie von Olfers
Portikus
Alte Brücke 2 / Maininsel
60594 Frankfurt am Main
Tel. +49 69 962 44 540
www.portikus.de – info@portikus.de
