Exhibitions

TAKE FIVE
5 Artists, 5 Weeks, 5 Exhibitions
January 9 - February 10, 2018
Galerie EIGEN + ART Berlin

Tom Anholt
January 9 - 13, 2018

Tom Anholt’s works revolve around a potential transition. Clearly, Anholt refuses rigidity and foregone conclusions. His paintings can be seen as openings or intermediate spaces. They balance on the verge between the concrete and the abstract. He who carefully observes the paintings, will notice traces of their emergence. Almost always they were repainted several times. All these works have something in common. By revealing their own process of origination they all tell a story, and even history. On every painting one can find mysterious curves that seem to illustrate an otherwise invisible energy flow or small, luminous dots, which appear like star dust right out of a fairy tale. Undoubtedly, these works can be located in an intermediate reality. They have the ability to put you in a certain state, that one finds himself in right after waking up, when the consciousness immerses into the so-called “real reality”. Whereas the visions of our dreams, which have a different reality, dissolve so relentlessly, causing a certain melancholy.But different from such visions and dreams, Anholts paintings don't dissolve. They endure and allow an experience, which may be at first glance unremarkable, but fully transport the viewer to the artist’s world. Anholt is taking the viewer on a journey.

Mirjam Völker
January 16 - 20, 2018

The play with fragile compositions, the interlocking of vegetation and space created by humans, is a recurrent component in Miriam Völker’s painting. You are able to see cottages, barracks, refuges that no longer fulfill their original purpose of offering people or other living things protection and shelter. In the surreal paintings and drawings, a tense fight flares up between nature and civilization artifacts, and yet they are very similar when they rampantly mesh and destroy each other. In some places, the homes and overgrowths are becoming transparent and the materiality seems to dissolve. This interplay between the overlay of the levels and the

dissolution leads together with the daring perspectives to an impression of discomfort and fragility. The chaotic and unstable appearance, stands in contrast to the precision and accuracy, with which Mirjam Völker creates her detailed images with acrylic and charcoal. This leads to quite different forms of vegetation-homes combinations where one wonders what is rampant in what, nature in the homes or homes in the nature?

Titus Schade
January 23 - 27, 2018

The blurring of spatial dimensions with which Titus Schade confronts viewers appears repeatedly in the work of the artist. He alternately minimizes his pictorial spaces to scale-model size, before which he places viewers like children in front of a dollhouse, or he has them grow into oversized film sets in which the human scale is shrunken to millimetre size. Titus Schade works with a visual cosmos consisting of architectures and staged pictorial spaces as if making use of a model kit that has grown over the years, arranging the collected modules into new self- contained worlds time and again. The shelving motif that recurs in his pictures seems to symbolize this. He assembles individual objects in other works to create stages, has them become backdrops that are illuminated not by spotlights, but rather by a full moon as the only source of light. Half-timbered houses encounter austere nineteen-sixties facades, overlong roofs, and formidable towers. They seem familiar – the typical German buildings seen many times from train windows while traveling through landscapes – and yet nevertheless impossible to assign to any specific place, anonymized and liberated from any regional character, universally lending themselves to use again and again like model houses from no-longer- fashionable toy train sets. Monotonous and yet refined in their graphically structured decorativeness, they represent a place that does not exist. What we see may only be a detail, a dollhouse-sized fragment of a much larger world, of which the artist reveals only a mere fraction.

Ross Chisholm
January 30 - February 3, 2018

"This work is the continuation of the body of work produced in China last summer, where I started using William Blake’s illustrations for Dantes' "Divine Comedy" as a starting point for the work. The idea of the poets journeying through heaven and hell became a slightly humorous romantic analogy for the painter in the studio. It also allowed me to think about the figuration and abstraction in slightly different ways from before. Where the figure is crafted from, or revealed by the abstraction.“ (Ross Chisholm)

William Blake ́s belief of an accurate depiction of reality was based on the subjective memory instead of a detailed reproduction of what the eye acutally perceives. Much more important is the reflection or rather the visualisation of personal thoughts, opinions and experiences. On this basis Ross Chisholm creates a space in his works where the figurative meets abstraction without excluding each other. With his use of geometric abstraction combined with Old Master techniques of traditional portraiture, Ross Chisholm developed a style of his own with a unique painterly quality.

Kristina Schuldt
February 6 - 10, 2018

Kristina Schuldt draws from a repertoire of forms and styles that she encounters everywhere: reading art-historical photo volumes on Dutch genre painting or 20th-century Constructivism and Cubism, leafing through tabloid newspapers, observing people on the street with their smartphones or working in the garden. Her pictures arouse memories of an already seen canon, of body surfaces polished sleek or of the wavy hair of Fernand Léger's machine people, for example, or of Pablo Picasso's strangely deformed and multi-perspectival portraits; they develop a life of their own and an energy that arises not least through the use of intense colors like pink or electric blue. The titles are ambiguous and misleading; they provide a direction without wanting to reveal too much. Kristina Schuldt uses them like an additional color and finds them by walking back through the picture as on a path, in search of the trigger.