Carnivalesca

The Kunstverein in Hamburg is delighted to present the group exhibition Carnivalesca – What Painting might be digitally from March 5 on. You can find the continuously updated additional program on our social media channels and on our website.

Featuring: Firelei Báez, Semiha Berksoy, Anna Betbeze, Anna Boghiguian, Hugo Canoilas, Beatriz González, El Hadji Sy, Donna Huanca, Helen Johnson, Lee Kit, Victor Man, Thao Nguyen Phan, Khalil Rabah, Raphaela Vogel

With the group exhibition Carnivalesca we want to create a dialogue with a traditional art form: painting. For this approach, we have looked to the meaning of carnival—a cultural phenomenon that has undergone innumerable syncretic cultural transformations around the world, and which evokes exuberance, delight and even melancholy. The space of carnival is where hierarchies are brought into question and a plural set of positions are present, from this perspective, we propose that painting is not a neat nor ordered discourse. Instead, we propose that what constitutes such a “medium” or “discipline” in today’s non-disciplinary field of art is a Carnivalesque space. One where performativity, bodies, artist-subjects and their gestures, as well as their plural, global histories of signification, are formally equal.

This is intended as a strategy to move beyond the orthodoxies of Western art and its control over what painting is, be it through the strict Modernist formalism of Clement Greenberg or its earlier place atop the hierarchy of the Fine Arts. To move towards a pluralistic and speculative approach to what painting might be in a world where cultural classifications are challenged from all sides, and where artists from around the world are active in decentering dominant cultural narratives. Today any attempt at understanding what painting might be has to account for these complexities that are both historical and contemporary nature. 

This exhibition highlights advances across generations of artists who have stretched the boundaries of what constitutes painting. To show practices of contemporary international painting that expose the full variety of artistic approaches, diversity of discursive engagement with the medium, and the ways in which painting is given shape in a multiplicity of individual expressions across cultures.

The exhibition is kindly supported by the Körber-Stiftung, the ZEIT-Stiftung, the Bundeskanzleramt and the Ministry of Culture and Media of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg.

Curated by Bettina Steinbrügge and Nicholas Tammens

In our event series #DIALOGUES we discuss different aspects of painting with artists and experts. Live via Zoom every Thursday throughout the exhibition with Raphaela Vogel, Hugo Canoilas, Anna Betbetze, Helen Johnson, El Hadji Sy, Clémentine Deliss, Lee Kit, Khalil Rabah, among others.