Evelyne Axell and Tal R

Evelyne Axell

La Terre est ronde

Until June 13, 2011



Tal R

The elephant behind the clown
Until June 13, 2011



Der Kunstverein, since 1817
Klosterwall 23
20095 Hamburg
www.kunstverein.de

Evelyne Axell (1935–1972), a key figure in Belgian pop art, is among the artists whose work is just emerging from the shadow cast by male pop heroes for reassessment. She experimented with various contemporary materials, combining plexiglas with enamel, with synthetic fur, foils, etc. to create substantively and visually seductive pictures. Her unusual material aesthetics combines mass-produced materials previously in advertising and industry rather than in the arts, which to some extent required considerable manual crafting. Axell used half-transparent plexiglas, painting sometimes on the front and sometimes on the reverse side in staggered compositions producing an interplay of transparent and opaque surfaces. The Kunstverein Hamburg shows a selection of later works from her very brief artistic career, which ended with her accidental death in 1972. Influenced by the 1960s and the social and political events of that period, her works penetrate taboo zones, compensating a new freedom that escapes all constraints imposed by the role of home-maker and by the stylization of woman as the object of male desire. Axell appropriates the image of the seductively denuded woman in order to incorporate it into her own desire. For her time, Axell treated materials with remarkable freedom and had addressed feminist topics even before the advent of feminism. In times when the self-image is determined externally by advertising and other medial representations, her policy of self preoccupation is of enduring relevance.



The visual compositions by the Israeli-Danish artist Tal R (*1967, lives in Copenhagen) unite cultural references from foreign cultures, myths, and our everyday world, and open up a broad spectrum of interpretation. Not everything can be learned in detail, much is merely hinted at and points in various directions. In recent works, for example, motifs from the circus, the theatre, or oriental tales repeatedly appear. Places and situations are associated with the dream worlds of earliest childhood, which give much scope for one’s own fantasy and for playing with identities. The formal discourse always takes place in relation to the canvas. Tal R sees himself quite consciously as a painter who plays with the variations and possibilities that painting offers. For the current complex of works from the past two years that are on show at Kunstverein Hamburg he has used a mixture of rabbit-hide glue and various pigments, which, sometimes supplemented by crayon, he applies directly to the canvas. The paint is applied very thinly and flatly, brushstrokes are not apparent. The works lack the special style, the aura of oil painting owing to the dry and rough surface. The Kunstverein Hamburg is presenting the some 20 works in a newly erected pavilion on the first floor. This creates a “space in space” situation, which intensifies the meeting with the works. Presenting them so closely side-by-side produces a vortex that captivates viewers, releasing them only when all puzzles have been prospected and mazes explored. 


The exhibition is accompanied by a publication with an interview between Tal R and Florian Waldvogel.



Upcoming: 

Plamen Dejanoff
Opening: June 18, 2011 



Henning Bohl and Charley Harper 

Opening: June 24, 2011




The exhibition of Tal R is funded by Danish Arts Council. The Kunstverein is funded by Freie und Hansestadt Hamburg – Kulturbehörde.