CLAUDIA & JULIA MÜLLER:
Tut tut tut.
FOYER
PHILIPPE DECRAUZAT
KIOSK
CHRISTOPH KELLER:
BEYOND KIOSK
7 April – 1 June 2008
Sunday, 6 April 2008, 11 am opening
Reception: Thomas Grundmann, chairman
Greetings: Klaus Bucher, consul general of Switzerland
Introduction: Christina Végh, director
2 pm KIOSK: Introduction by CHRISTOPH KELLER on the project
BEYOND KIOSK and independent art publishing
CLAUDIA & JULIA MÜLLER:Tut tut tut.
In a world pervaded by fears and desires, the distinction between being and seeming is in the eye of the beholder. For their solo presentation at the Bonn Kunstverein, the artists CLAUDIA & JULIA MÜLLER (*1964, *1956, live in Basel) have designed rooms of illusion. Starting out with their graphic work, a dispositive unfolds, whose unstable semantic carriers are linked in a changeable narrative structure.
Similar to an ancestral portrait gallery, the sisters stage a series of flip-flop pictures that, designed as multiple wall collages, take in the room’s full height of six meters. The double portraits involve the viewer in a game of different, yet simultaneous contexts.
The coupling and the pictorial union of political figures, animal and man, freedom fighters, carnival merrymakers and figures from the contemporary media world call up an absurd, vanity-fair society. Shadow projections and masquerades, silhouettes and three-dimensional elements, doubling and inversion, all serve as a means of presenting outward illusion in its proper light. In between the wall collages, small-scale work series from the past five years alternate.
A collection of pictures and collages somewhere between (art) historical models, everyday media reality and science fiction serve as the basis. In the installation at the Bonner Kunstverein, the pictures merge into a complex narration of the story and the fear of our possible cultural molding in the present-day world.
PHILIPPE DECRAUZAT
The mural that PHILIPPE DECRAUZAT (*1974, lives in Lausanne) has designed for the Bonner Kunstverein is assembled from alternating black and magenta-colored lines spanned across 20 meters. They are gradually inscribed in the wall’s white plane so that, after a pictorial crescendo, they just as gradually fade again.
The movement of the incoming visitor is absorbed by them and visually reinforced. The precision of the lines leads to a shimmery moiré effect that sets the stage for the theme of motion as the phenomenological process of perception.
The work exists in a series that DECRAUZAT has continued since 2000, whose starting point is a fascination with REM sleep (rapid eye movement) that commonly describes the dream phase in which the eyes move jerkily under closed lids. The work, under constant threat of disappearing via its flickering effects, allows after-images to arise: images seen without use of the eyes.
With his work that includes painting, film and sculpture, DECRAUZAT stands within the force field of artistic abstraction. He deploys, as his starting point, Russian Constructivism, OP Art or the geometrics of Minimalism in order to link them to pop culture, science fiction or cinematography.
CHRISTOPH KELLER: BEYOND KIOSK
BEYOND KIOSK, Modes of Multiplication. Independent Art Publishing today is an archive project of CHRISTOPH KELLER (book designer, editor, publisher, et al. Revolver, Christoph Keller Editions, JRP/Ringler), which was developed for the Bonner Kunstverein and ICA Philadelphia. The presentation is based on Keller’s comprehensive archive KIOSK on the theme of “Independent Art Publishing” that, over the past seven years, has toured the world and been exhibited in over 20 institutions.
From approx. 6,500 archive publications from over 450 publishers and magazine projects, approx. 500 of the most interesting publication models were chosen for BEYOND KIOSK. The selection criteria were, above all, the strategies, motivations, programs and profiles of the editors and publishers.
BONNER KUNSTVEREIN
Hochstadenring 22, 53119 Bonn, Germany
Tel. +49 228 693936, Fax +49 228 695589
Tue – Sun 11 a.m. – 5 p.m., Thu 11 a.m. – 7 p.m., closed on Mondays
ARTOTHEK Wed, Fri 2 – 5 p.m, Thu 2 – 7 p.m, Sat 11 a.m. – 1 p.m.
www.bonner-kunstverein.de
