Heiko Karn

Beyond Belonging

23 January - 14 March 2010

between aside behind, things walls windows, functions, dialectical system, division, marking
In his artistic approach Heiko Karn (b. 1971) tackles the question of what can be seen under which conditions and how certain objects can be perceived. The boundary between object and viewer as it is also established by the Kunstverein's window display is another important point of interest for Karn. In private as well as in public, language and signs in general produce labellings, representations and appropriations - all indicating a definite aim to influence certain interests and opinions.

Hajnalka Tarr

28 November 2009 - 17 January 2010

The Hungarian artist Hajnalka Tarr (b. 1977) focuses in her installations on spatial straining by inserting mirrors or assembling unusual objects in space.
She explores the possibilities of absolute capaciousness, whose physical or visual perception dissolves internal boundaries and relieves both the artist and the viewer of their fears and inner inhibitions. The sense of infinity and unlimity results out of the visual expansion of space and the particular spatial experience.
The artist works with banal, everyday objects, such as safety pins or clothes hangers, which occur to the viewer both familiar and meaningless. We know and use them in our everyday life without any feelings or any reflections. They merely gain importance – even on an aesthetic level – by structuring the space within the installation. Hajnalka Tarr creates the illusion of an endless corridor within the display window; countless empty hangers next to one of the many city’s shopping streets underline the work’s critical dimension.

David Jablonowski

Imposition

10 October – 22 November 2009

Starting from the Gothic book illustrations of Manesse Codex, Amsterdam-based artist David Jablonowski (*1982) conceived sculptures for the Kunstverein's display window, which are to question the utopia of direct communication by their cryptic imagery. Jablonowski perceives the meaningful and educational attitude of sculpture as a form of "Imposition". This leads him to late-medieval illustrations which, by their formal exaggeration, present themselves as symbol for the act of historical tradition. By linking art-historical conventions of representation with contemporary methods of display, Jablonowski dedicates himself to the parameters of sculpture and its communicative potential.

Katharina Marszewski

Adorable Walker

15 August – 4 October 2009

The Berlin-based artist Katharina Marszewski (*1980 in Warsaw) composes an interplay of photography, drawing, silkscreen, collage and found as well as designed objects. Her installation's title alludes to the literary figure of the "flâneur" who strolls around the streets of metropolises and just goes with the flow. Only the tiniest bits of observations suffice for him to feed his imagination and to make him reflect and contextualize the given impressions upon his own individual background. Gazing at the Kunstverein display one is tempted to drift just like a flâneur. Yet, Marszewski always arranges her compositions according to a highly intentional and sensible set of organising principles based on subjective and personal motives. She creates a kind of storyboard for potential worlds, meanings and spheres of activities, but without ever fully dissolving their speculative character.

Lasse Schmidt Hansen

Andere Aktivitäten (Other Activities)

27 June – 9 August 2009

The Danish artist Lasse Schmidt Hansen (*1978) deals with regularities and contingencies, standardisation and targeted divergencies. He disarranges fixed systems like the scale of millimetre paper or designs alternative versions of Ikea-shelves. By denying industrial norms he proposes new modes of perception.

Jason Dodge

and for this I will call you the listener.

9 May – 21 June 2009

Jason Dodge's works are minimal and eloquent at the same time. They allude to events beyond empirical traceability with felicitous emphasis. People, places and events configure a narrative that cannot clearly be assigned to fiction or reality.
Nevertheless, the objects' presence in space refers to the presence of something else: the imaginational potential of the real as well as the possibility of interpreting the world in another way.

Charlotte Moth

BEHIND EVERY SURFACE THERE IS A MYSTERY:
a hand that might emerge,
an image that might be kindled,
or a structure that might reveal its image*

14 March – 26 April 2009

In the works of Charlotte Moth (*1978) sites play a crucial role: Moth understands them as spatial context and frame of reference for her installations as well as a social space that undergoes permanent shifts of meaning due to its use. Since 1999 the British artist has been working on her photographic archive „Travelogue". In various ways her installations conceptually evolve out of these photographs of sites and embed them into a certain surrounding. In the Schaufenster Kunstverein Moth sets up a stage for a nonexisting object by installing a curtain with sequins of gold. A picture from her archive with its reflections of sunshine on a water surface serves as the visual connection to the glistening fabric. The significant void of this missing hint illustrates the instability of references and the variety of their possible connotations.

Charlotte Moth designed an insert of the 02/08 edition of the Kunstvereins magazine „Béton Brut". Herein the picture she refers to can be seen among others from her work „Travelogue".

^{(*Alighiero e Boetti)}

Christine Moldrickx

You must be careful in the forest
Broken glass and rusty nails

29 November 2008 – 11 January 2009

Christine Moldrickx (*1984) engages in drawing and photography. Both are not treated absolute but are foremost part of a process of pictorial composition. In her work forms emerge as other forms, layer superimpose each other, is added and subtracted. Abstract surfaces develop that relate to their conditions, the image carrier, photographic and real space but simultaneously claim a form of (painterly) depiction for themselves.

Martin Hoener

Die Lösung

11 October - 23 November 2008

In his collages, drawings and paintings Martin Hoener (*1976) works on the borders of painterly concepts between abstraction and figuration. The process of developing as well as references are reflected in his conceptual compositions, that often transgress the painterly into installation, which themselves remain constitutional aspects. The installation in the Schaufenster circles directly around a moment of (potentially arriving) painterly exhaustion in the work of an artist. On one hand Bemalte und unbemalte, but already primed canvasses turn the Schaufenster into a space of production. In combining images by the respective artist with other images and through the visible process of reworking and repainting on the painted canvasses, the claim of a back door is put forward and made publicly known in the format display window. Is anything possible, if anything is possible?

Julia Horstmann

Die andere Seite

02 August – 28 September 2008

Starting from architecture photography and architectural concepts Julia Horstmann develops spatial scenarios in her installations that make visible their boundaries and inconsistencies. Views are being blocked, repulsed by mirroring surfaces and vistas are guided through framing.

Kristoffer Frick / Eric Bell

No Soldiers in the Scenery

21 June – 27 July 2008

The Canadian artists Kristoffer Frick and Eric Bell (both *1985) present from June 21 - July 27 2008 the installation »No Soldiers in the Scenery« at the "Schaufenster Kunstverein" situated at no. 10 Neustraße. The title is
derived from a poem by Wallace Stevens, which centres upon the idea of a moment bereft of memory captured in the here and now. The basis of their preoccupation with architecture and design of the past decades are the unrealised utopias and non-functionality conceived as progressive designs.
Released from the original closed-off set of meanings, they develop what is nearly an uncanny life of their own.

funded by Botschaft von Kanada, Berlin

Photograph: Yun Lee, Düsseldorf, 2008

Neville Rae

A Town for Tomorrow

10 May – 15 June 2008

The Scottish town Cumbernauld lies 13 miles North of Glasgow. In 1956 it was developed to solve the problematic housing situation in Glasgow. In the Sixties Cumbernauld was designed by architects and urban planners with a focus on functionality and quality of life. In the midst of nature an urban utopia arose, that functioned without any crossings, which seperated pedestrians and traffic and set out to combine all civic anemities with each housing scheme having access to its own green space.
The Scottish artist Neville Rae turns to those nowadays unloved ideas of modern new town planning and tries to make visible their fascination and power of imagination through his projects.

Photograph: Yun Lee, Düsseldorf, 2008

Ellen Munro

Parthenonandonandon

29 March – 27 April 2008

Ellen Munro (*1980) lives and works in Edinburgh, the so-called Athens of the North. Her work "Parthenonandonandon", which is on show in "Schaufenster Kunstverein" (Neustr, 10, Düsseldorf), questions in a humourous and at the same time critical way the contemporaneous relationship to the heritage of a stereotype of antiquity conveyed through neo-classical architecture and the Elgin or Parthenon Marbles.

funded by Hope Scott Trust, Scotland

Photograph: Yun Lee, Düsseldorf, 2008

Gwenneth Boelens

Ramble

16 February – 23 March 2008

With the installation „Ramble" by Dutch artist Gwenneth Boelens (*1980) the project space „Schaufenster" of the Kunstverein premieres.
„to ramble" means zielloses Spazieren um des Vergnügens willen, bezeichnet aber auch einen "wilden Garten" im New Yorker Central Park. Das endlose, schwarz-weiße Panorama der fotografischen Collage von Boelens konstruiert wie der Park eine artifizielle Wildnis inmitten der Stadt. Die Collage wird untertitelt von einer monologischen Reflexion über diese Doppeldeutigkeit zwischen Kultur und Natur, die in Endlosschleife auf einem daneben stehenden Monitor läuft.

funded by Niederländisches Generalkonsulat, Düsseldorf