ALEXANDER OCHS GALLERIES BERLIN I BEIJING
Besselstraße 14
D-10969
Berlin
Germany
Europe
T: +49 (0) 30. 24 00 866 80
F:
M:
W: www.alexanderochs-galleries.com
Heribert C. Ottersbach, Die Narrenprozession (1-3), 2008-09, acrylic on canvas, each 200 x 185 cm LUZIA SIMONS bei DISTANZ | ART COLOGNE 17.-22. April 2012
DA SIND WIR WIEDER ALLEIN Arbeiten und Werkkomplexe 2003-2012
HERE WE ARE, ALONE AGAIN Paintings and Body of Work 2003-2012
OPENING Friday, April 27th, 2012 | 7 pm - 9 pm Heribert C. Ottersbach will be present.
EXHIBITION April 28th - May 25th, 2012
OPENING HOURS Tue - Sat I 11 am - 6 pm
The subjects of Heribert C. Ottersbach’s paintings are mostly architecture, landscapes, portraits or scenes of demonstrations. At first glance, the architectural subjects appear so commonplace that they prevent any clear identification. Ottersbach drives the formal austerity of the buildings to an extreme in such a way that the distance between the viewer and the painting is ostentatiously challenged. Also the idyll of natural landscapes is significantly altered. Bright glazed lines run through the images like misprints, or thick opaque stripes overlap the former idyll to create new image levels with essentially unnatural structures.
The consistent interference with the image challenges all utopian promises of modernism and pre-modernism. Not only the utopias, but also their alleged failure is the focus of Ottersbach’s work. The ‘sanatorium of modernity’ as Ottersbach says ‘is now closed, the therapists are dead’ and the uncured patients are ‘now all alone again’. This is the starting point of his work, as well as the title of this exhibition.
The images are composed on computers. Ottersbach assembles them from templates, which he takes from the available image stock and then edits. These constructions from fragments of the visual, which always precede a deconstruction, almost inevitably create a transformed perspective of the visible. This can cause not only new perceptions of reality, but also new concepts of it, which ultimately constitutes the social value of art and the importance of painting.
After Otterbach’s first solo exhibition in our Beijing gallery in 2011, outstanding works from 2003 to 2012 have been selected for this exhibition, some of which have never before been shown in galleries. The artist has previously had solo exhibitions at the Folkwang Museum in Essen, in the Kunsthalle Tübingen, in the Altana Kulturstiftung, Bad Homburg, the Institut Mathildenhöhe in Darmstadt and at the Hamburger Kunsthalle.
Heribert C. Ottersbach was born in Cologne in 1960. He lives and works in Cologne and Sörmland (Sweden). He is a professor for painting at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst (School of Visual Arts) in Leipzig since 2009.
LUZIA SIMONS at DISTANZ | ART COLOGNE April 17th–22nd, 2012
Since 1996, Luzia Simons (*1953, Brazil; lives and works in Berlin), employing a novel and extraordinary imaging technique, has created a large number of enchanting works that make up her series Stockage. Arranging the flowers and leaves of a wide variety of tulip species on a specialized high-resolution scanner, she produces scanograms of intensely brilliant colors and tremendous acuity. As in digital photography, the data produced by the scanner are then output onto often very large physical media and mounted behind plexiglass. Simons also stages the tulips as a sort of homage to Baroque Dutch or Flemish still lifes with flowers, sometimes suggesting the “tulipomania” in seventeenth-century Holland, the ultimately ruinous trade with tulips and their bulbs. Now a wild-growing Asian plant, now a species overbred to satisfy modern Western European demand, the motif of the tulip spans the chasm between nature and culture, and that, Simons believes, makes it a unique material on the level of form as well as content for her ethereal utopia of beauty
LUZIA SIMONS. Includes contributions by Matthias Harder and Hans-Olaf Henkel. DISTANZ Verlag Berlin German/English/French/Portuguese 24 x 30 cm, 160 pages, approx. 80 colour images, hardcover, belly band
Book release at ART COLOGNE on April 17th | Hall 11.3/Booth B-039, and at DISTANZ Verlag, Hall 11.3/Booth E-042
RADEK SZLAGA in Cologne April 16th-26th, 2012 Polish artist Radek Szlaga paints from photos, draws motifs from the iconosphere of culture and pop culture in a broad sense. He is fascinated with mass media, often turns to politics, history, and religion, mixing everything with everything according to a recipe known only to himself, where the main ingredients are sensitivity and artistic intuition. What emerges from Szlaga’s canvases is a mutated world of visual quotes, organised according to a logic of chaos and emotions. Coming Soon (arrière-garde) | Temporary Gallery Cologne, Mauritiuswall 35, Cologne
ANNA KOTT in Leipzig April 28th – May 26th, 2012The background and subject of Anna Kott is dedicated exclusively to ‘the female’ and the apparent public image the gender has. In her paintings, she assigns the role of the message carrier to female nudes, seemingly totalitarian – militant female portraits and others, who bring glossy magazines to mind. Subduing female nudes are followed by portraits which are distinguished by strong views. SØR Rusche Sammlung: Eros & Thanatos | Werkschauhalle, Baumwollspinnerei, Leipzig.
LIN JINGJING in Beijing up to May 6th, 2012In the current Lin Jingjing exhibition in our gallery in Beijing, we present installations, objects and photographs. Lin's works are often combined with performative processes. Silence and evident reluctance are significant characteristics of Lin's artistic language. Nevertheless, her expression is so strong that it goes beyond the beauty of the works and confronts the viewer with existential topics. My Promise of Your Happiness | ALEXANDER OCHS GALLERIES BERLIN | BEIJING, Beijing
