The Exhibition

Architectonic Forms
The Berlin architect, Philipp von Matt, demonstrates the ambivalent presence of uncompromisingly static architectural structures which – when photographed from a moving car in the streets of Tokyo – become fragile patterns of transience.

The Serial Monotony
of houses is explored in archival aerial views presented by Peter Piller. As photographic and therefore factual works that are void of any apparent traces of human life, they evoke a speculative finality. Equally, the anonymous handyman and model-home aesthetic demonstrated in glossy paintings on cardboard by Stefan Strunden testify to their rigidity beyond habitability and architectural logic.

To erect a place in space and time through a three-dimensional Idea
Horst Münch creates allegedly stable places with hermetic forms containing unsettling hollow spaces. Similarly, the “haunted houses” created by Katharina Jahnke float between fictitious and real nightmares. She explores the theme of houses of destruction that have long lost their original sheltering function. Dwellings of the soul, archaic archetypes which, in their anthropomorphic forms, resemble the birth of long-forgotten prototypes are shown by Leiko Ikemura.
In the tension created between wall and floor tiles that can either stepped upon or are to be avoided Boaz Kaizman creates a subtle, tactile game with impermeable accesses and entrances that demonstrate variations of the room in terms of spatial definition.
In contrast, the single door detached from “a totally isolated room” created by Gregor Schneider evokes an unsettling sense of archetypical hermetic reserve. Similarly, the non-functional awnings objects by Rita McBride assert themselves through a sense of absurd and surreal dignity in their overriding aesthetic presence.

Projections of the “cozy home”
are depicted by Pjotr Dluzniewski in scenes of minute and saccharine domestic tranquility with inherent ironic undertones. In works combining delicate pastel tones and stark white backgrounds Katharina von Hoffs skims the wanderlust allures of “home is where the heart is” in a sparse pictorial language. The drawings by Leif Trenkler depict houses embedded in seemingly endless landscape backdrops that evoke scenes both bucolic and idyllic, which transcend the realm and limitations of temporal, perspective logic. By contrast, the fragile yet immoveable psychological frameworks depicted in the houses drawn by Karl Bohrmann convey immense monumentality.

Interiors as Mental and Psychological Living Spaces
Ulrike Nattermüller uses her pictures of interiors to communicate the peculiar interaction between figures, objects and ornaments. With the help of perspective distortion and an emphasized two-dimensionality, living space transforms itself into a stencil-like vacuum of immobility. The opposite is demonstrated in the very three-dimensional, daring interior by Peter Sutter in his painted relief-image “My Room”, rendered in the highly private and therefore “inverted perspective” of individual perception. From the vantage point of his very special vision and position as an artist, namely while lying in his bed, he depicts furniture and objects in a surreal, tilted perspective. Sumi Maro's portrays flat stencils of houses which “house” painted pictures of interiors and copied Madonna portraits. His constructed pictures subtly sway between religion and profanity and position the artist between dilettantism and perfectionism.

Border Markers between Fiction and Reality
The Chilean video artist, Edgar Endress, examines a recent incident in which an illegal immigrant was shot by Chilean border guards on Peruvian border. In an extravagant film and video presentation. Endress employs the confrontation of documentary pictures (borrowed from reports shown on Chilean television stations) with timeless images of borders, people and marked territories. By directly comparing these images he transforms allegedly actual news into frozen icons. The “Truth as Fiction” already addressed in the work’s title makes an attempt to place not only the identity of the illegal immigrant but also that of the observer within the framework of abstraction.

Ulrike Jagla-Blankenburg