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Kai Schiemenz
14 January 2014 - 18 2014
Opening: Tuesday, 14 January 2014, 5-9 p.m.

Kai Schiemenz's works are concerned with the city, space, architecture, and the regulating effect these constructs gave on people. His small-format sculptures are structures, complete in themselves, in which he combines digital technologies with natural materials like wood or paper. At the same time, they function as models for expansive installations and architectures for exterior and interior spaces, in which Schiemenz uses lines of sight to construct spaces that involve the viewer directly by means of their permeability.

He often works with social sculpture or active architecture that asks about the connection between built spaces and community. This means that architectures are not mere containers for human needs and desires, but themselves generate human qualities and needs, just as experiences and observations construct and influence every image we make of things. At the center of his work are not naturally grown landscapes, but urban ones, i.e., what man makes out of nature. A particular eye is thereby cast on the regularities, geometries, and orders of nature that human beings appropriate and use.

In his solo exhibition, Schiemenz shows two new groups of works in which the concept of architecture increasingly dissolves and the artificial materiality of the surfaces moves to the foreground. Built, architectonic, constructed space is juxtaposed with a group of geometrical, glass objects whose forms recall ores or grown crystals, but which display a purely artificial and made materiality. Substantively and practically, however, the point is not to oppose digital, artificial materials to natural or manual processes, but for the two sides' intermeshing to see and be seen.

Kai Schiemenz constructs a space from totally artificial materials – the reflecting surfaces of mirroring pillars, PVC sheets, lights, trashy plastics, and colorful or reflecting Plexiglas dissolve the built architecture and create a new space – a façade that each visitor perceives individually via lines of sight.

This glitteringly pleasant eye-catching optical effect confronts a group of glass objects that function as a visualization of avant-garde architectonic ideas and utopias. Colored, opaque, intricate glass crystal forms stand on sculptural columns in the room like objects perfect in themselves. Their closed density takes up the futuristic forms and visions of Bruno Tautscher's architecture of the 1920s, when he and other proponents of the Neues Bauen (New Objectivity or New Building) were gripped by a driving socio-economic idea that generated huge forces in architectonic imaginings and projects.

Kai Schiemenz (*1966 in Erfurt) studied at the Kunsthochschule (College of Arts) Berlin-Weißensee and the Universität der Künste (University of Arts) Berlin. He has shown his work in numerous group and solo exhibitions, including at the Kunstverein Wuppertal, griffelkunst Hamburg, the Kunstverein Harbuger Bahnhof, MARTHa Herford, and the Zeppelin Museum Friedrichshafen. He lives and works in Berlin.

See the work of Kai Schiemenz

TAKE FIVE
5 Weeks, 5 Artists, 5 Exhibitions
Galerie EIGEN + ART Berlin

With TAKE FIVE, the Galerie EIGEN + ART Berlin will show five exhibitions of five young artists for five weeks beginning on 14 January 2014.

The exhibitions will open weekly from Tuesday from 5 to 9 pm and be shown through Saturday. Each of the five artists has developed new works for the showing. With works that range from sculpture through painting and drawing to room installations, the gallery will thereby become the stage for a diverse exhibition program for a period of five weeks: Melora Kuhn and Lada Nakonechna have already been seen with exhibitions in the EIGEN+ART Lab; Mirjam Völker, Kristina Schuldt, and Kai Schiemenz were represented in group exhibitions in the Berlin and Leipzig galleries.


Melora Kuh21
January 2014 - 25 January 2014
Opening: Tuesday 21 January 2014, 5 to 9 pm

The works of Melora Kuhn (*1971 in Boston, lives and works in New York) are a constant observation of people's experiences with themselves and with society. Kuhn makes use of the pictorial language of mythologies and history, in particular the pictorial forms of 19th-century American art history, from which she isolates individual pictures and places them in a new context. Her interest thereby is in details that are forgotten or elided in the narrative, in order to take a firmly established and well-known story in another direction and to inscribe a new readability into the personal biographies of the protagonists in her pictures. To do this, she uses the background to hint at the persons' state of mind or a contour drawing above the portrait to add a second narration. She will show new paintings in her exhibition.

See the work of Melora Kuhn

Mirjam Völker
28 January 2014 - 1 February 2014
Opening: Tuesday 28 January 2014, 5 to 9 pm

Mirjam Völker (*1977 in Wiesbaden, lives and works in Leipzig) is interested in forms of housing in her paintings. In the form of tree houses, poorly cobbled together huts, mobile homes, or vehicle cabs, they are placed like foreign objects in the midst of nature, where thickets overgrow and conquer them. These housings fail to fulfill their intended purpose, namely to provide shelter and safety from external influences, and they offer signs of discomfort and fragility instead of security and warmth. In her new large-format works on paper, provisional wooden huts stand on rickety stilts in a network of branches with no solid floor. They bear traces of former inhabitants and are now abandoned entirely to themselves and nature, which displaces them and brings them down like uninvited intruders.

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Lada Nakonechna
11 February 2014 - 15 February 2014
Opening: Tuesday 11 February 2014, 5 to 9 pm

Lada Nakonechna (*1981 in Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine, lives and works in Kiev) confronts the viewer in her drawings, installations, videos, and performances with pictures of current events and pictorial experiences from the collective memory, which she manipulates or distorts. She often lets the human being, in the form of the viewer, become a manipulative, disruptive factor who himself influences and changes a given picture. For her exhibition, Nakonechna places a tower in the middle of the gallery room; like a lighthouse, it casts a cone of light onto the surrounding walls. When trying to decipher the texts written on the walls, the viewer constantly blocks the light he needs, or is blinded and caught, and must move with the light to be able to grasp everything. The lighthouse is actually a symbol for a firm hold, a glimmer of hope on the horizon, toward which one orients oneself when one has lost one's way. But where can it lead when four high walls lock the light up in an empty room?

See the work of Lada Nakonechna

Kristina Schuldt
18 February 2014 – 22 February 2014
Opening: Tuesday 18 February 2014, 5 to 9 pm

In the pictures of Kristina Schuldt (*1982 in Moscow, lives and works in Leipzig), faceless women's bodies lie, fall, loll languorously, or bend themselves, as two-dimensional tubes. They thereby resemble smoothly polished machines more than living beings. Kristina Schuldt unashamedly makes use of the pictorial forms of Classic Modernism, but she creates her own new pictorial language, for example from the wavy hair of a Fernand Léger painting and powerful, schematized bodies that recall the avant-garde pictures of the 1920s. She exposes her figures to a garish party illumination and uses cigarettes and miniskirts to give them a nonchalance and coolness that is more reminiscent of teenagers than of mature, strong women. While in her earlier pictures the figures and their limbs were subjected and "bored into" their situation, in the new works in the exhibition, an increasing consciousness of morals comes into play and is reflected in the bodies.

See the work of Kristina Schuldt

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