JULIAN-JAKOB KNEER

September 11th - October 23rd, 2021

Opening, Saturday, September 11th 4 - 8 PM

LACHEN IST DIE SCHÖNSTE ART ZÄHNE ZU ZEIGEN

SOGAR DIE GRÖSSTEN STARS ENTDECKEN SICH SELBST IM SPIEGELGLAS / LEBEN IHR LEBEN IM SPIEGELGLAS

BORN TO STAND OUT

WITNESS ME

DECAYDANCE

SELL THE  HOUSE SELL THE CAR SELL THE KIDS

HARDCOEUR HEARTCORE

MADLEY

NATALIA ROLÓN

The Logical Song

July 30th - September 4th

Opening Thursday, July 29th, 11am - 7pm

Psychoanalysis might just be to Argentinians what the Zodiac is to queer people in L.A.: a constant topic of conversation, a real yardstick in one's life. At once elevator music, melodrama and absolute truth. Natalia Rolón grew up in Buenos Aires and has a background in the film industry. She is also a great music lover. Biography affects an artist’s work in complicated ways. Still, I’ll suggest, in Rolón’s work, the logic of pop songs and cinema meets the logic of psychoanalysis. That is to say, lyrical hooks, ear bugs, and beautiful, crafted narrative arcs collide with the fundamental impossibility of any kind of narrative at all. Psychoanalysis renders all narratives – indeed all coherence and plausibility – deeply suspect. They hide more than they seek. History begins to sound like a fiction, and fiction begins to sound peculiarly wishful. As such, the logic of Rolón's work is an illogic that puts images (and music) to the gripping story of the problem of story-telling.

As an exhibition, The Logical Song is both a mixtape and a filmic collage: each painting is a jump cut – a disruption to temporality – but without a contrast shot; we are never allowed the ground of perspective, or of place. In a similar way to how psychoanalysis is not about discovering what happened, or even if it happened at all, but about how it was worked into the patient's mind, here is a body of work preoccupied with how to describe time in relation to objects, light, colour and shadow – in one word: language  – and how to capture it inside a picture. This, of course, is an impossible, futile endeavour for which Rolón stages an absurdist drama with no protagonist and a series of false endings.

Childhood, as Freud described it, informed everything but predicted nothing. Human development was riddled with paralysing repetitions. Sexuality obsessed us, but what an obsession with sex was an obsession about was unclear. I do, I do, I do, I do, I do pictures the sci-fi fantasy that the existential question of how to be fully awake in the world might be solved by taking a pill, and the hilarity that even this desire for a thrown, unsheltered existence should be organised into a weekly pill dispenser. It is also a picture of the up-in-the-airness of everything. Like a pile of dishes that never collapses in the harsh light of a dusk that never ends (Endless, Endless IV), there is no fall-out, no decision. The certainty implied by its title never settles in this painting, as, in fact, it doesn't in ABBA's music either. Theirs is an oeuvre characterised by seeing things from a distance, or obliquely, always longing, or too late. This might have something to do with the fact that the songs were written by men for women – just as Freud wrote psychoanalysis in conversation with men but about women – manifesting an a priori sense of displacement.

To always be singing someone else's song – though not always literally – is a kind of modus operandi in Rolón’s work, which accounts for that soft brand of melancholy that tends to accompany absurdity. (As with any loss, the loss of sense requires mourning, too.) But this modus of the alienated and self-conscious story-teller is also one of performativity, humour, camp. If Rolón’s work belonged anywhere on a face it would be in the glimmer of the eye. Her paintbrush is tiny and agile and hovers just above the canvas like it could go anywhere, like it may just as well never touch it at all. A persistent sense of limbo, and the feeling that the real subject of the painting is just outside of the frame render the works, to use Freud’ word, overdetermined: of multiple causes, never just about one thing. Freud wrote that analysis only really gets going when the patient descends to minute detail from the well-wrought recollections which are their surrogate. In Rolón’s work, tension derives from how uncertainty is sustained through execution. It is a battle between creation and potential – a question of how to assert while continuing to flicker the answer to which is the detail: an extraordinary honing in, not just on an object but a moment. This time-space becomes so precise, so concentrated there is no room for desire only its frightful absence, pure suspense: a game, a hall of mirrors, a drop that falls and never hits the ground.

Kristian Vistrup Madsen

Natalia Rolón (*Buenos Aires. Lives and works in Berlin) studied at the Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main (Michael Krebber Class) and currently pursues an MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Bard College, NY. She holds a diploma in Diseño de Imagen y Sonido (Film) from the Universidad de Buenos Aires. Natalia Rolón has exhibited in Europe, USA and Latin America. Recently her works have been featured at Haus Wien, Vienna; Spoiler, Berlin; Pauline Perplexed, Paris; Castiglioni, Milan; Hester, New York; Portikus (in the context of Otobong Nkanga’s solo show), Frankfurt Am Main; Big Sur Gallery, Buenos Aires; a.o.

ANDRES PEREIRA PAZ

Isabel (in the Warmi Pachakuti)

May 28th - July 17th, 2021

Opening Friday, May 28th, 11am - 7pm

In Isabel (in the Warmi Pachakuti), Andrés Pereira Paz takes as a starting point the life stories of the women in his family – a matriarchy in which the name Isabel has been inherited for three generations – to propose a constellation of four works that reflect upon the life-sustaining labor that in the context of the pandemic has been placed at the center of public debate.

Although since the Sixties feminism has shown that the most important subsidy of capitalism is the reproductive labor performed by millions of women from their homes, it was not until the present global health crisis that an awareness of its centrality spread widely. Today, as we confront death from an unpredictable virus amidst collapsed health systems as a result of decades of neoliberal austerity policies, it is essential to recognize the deep implications of life on Earth and the need to turn care work into a collective project.

In a recent conference entitled Resistances, insurgencies and struggles for life in times of extermination, the Bolivian feminist theorist and activist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui highlighted the importance of the efforts made by women to mitigate the deadly effects of the patriarchal capitalist system. From pregnancy to breastfeeding, to caring for children and the elderly, among other labors mediated by love, women dedicate their bodies to the preserving of life on a daily basis. According to Rivera Cusicanqui, this historical experience in addition to the moral ruin of the economic system that was recently revealed by the pandemic, set the conditions for the arrival of what in the Andean world is known as a Warmi Pachakuti. This is an ethical and epistemic turn towards the feminine, which puts women and other feminized bodies in the first line of thought and action in the plight to overcome both present and future crisis.

Rivera Cusicanqui’s reflections form the backbone of Andrés’ project. In Isabel (in the Warmi Pachakuti) the artist vindicates the natural, the domestic and the biographical as spaces from which speaking out becomes more vital and effective than ever. Two of the works dismantle the imaginary that reduces nature to an inert and static economic resource. El despertar de la naturaleza (The awakening of nature) consists of a series of interventions on the homonymous painting by the twentieth century Bolivian painter and trade unionist Arturo Borda. In four copies of the original image – in which Borda represents nature as a naked and powerful woman as she awakens – Andrés has drawn different configurations of the kóa smoke emanating directly from the woman’s navel. By focusing on the navel, the artist recalls both the symbiotic unity with the mother, as well as the fundamental role of women in preserving human existence. On the other hand, Una propuesta de mural en homenaje al parlamento de las mujeres (A mural proposal in homage to the parliament of women) is a metal sculpture which reproduces the silhouettes of two flowers, the kantuta and the patujú, which symbolize the union and interculturality of Bolivian people in various national symbols. Intending to question the patriarchal and authoritarian core of national narratives, the artist conceived the piece as an insurrection of the flowers, this time rebelling to pay tribute to El parlamento de las mujeres (The parliament of women). Inspired by The Parliament of Bodies – Paul Preciado’s project for Documenta XIV (2019) in Athens – El parlamento de las mujeres was convoked by the anarchist and feminist collective Mujeres Creando in the face of the democratic crisis that Bolivia went through in 2019. While the streets of La Paz were militarized, a broad and diverse group of women came together to talk about what democracy meant to each of them, preventing the political conflict from taking total control of the social body.

The other two works of an autobiographical nature reveal the personal as deeply political. Retrato de Julia (Portrait of Julia) is a textile piece that reproduces the silhouette of a sculpture that for years decorated the artist's home in La Paz. The constitutive elements of the work were decided upon in an extended dialogue with Julia, a domestic worker of indigenous origins, that raised Andrés and his siblings during their childhood. The Star of David represents her evangelical faith, the star of Guamán Poma de Ayala symbolizes her indigenous identity, and the chuño and the tunta – two types of dehydrated potatoes that have been especially important during the pandemic – represent her daily struggle for subsistence. The artist conceived the piece as a reflection on the "aguayo complex", described by Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui as an affective conflict experienced by Latin American middle and upper-class children, who are raised by an indigenous woman who they love as a mother, but at the same time, feel ashamed due to the prevailing racism. Finally, Isabel (in the Warmi Pachakuti) is an embroidery on jute of an octopus ornamented with a glass eye, pearls, paper, pitahaya and lemon peels. Taking as a metaphorical starting point the octopus – a mollusc whose specificity is to carry the brain in its tentacles – the piece pays homage to the multiple adaptive capacities of the “Isabel” of his family, women who have raised their children regardless of the absence of father figures in an openly macho society like Bolivia.

We are trapped in an inescapable web of reciprocity. The virus has shown that the boundaries of our individuality are porous, that our own health depends on the health of the all. The recognition of this physiological interdependence challenges the ideal of Western individualism which is reinforced by the neoliberal economy, highlighting the urgency of creating communities based on caring. From ritualistic and emotional perspectives rather than purely rational, in Isabel (in the Warmi Pachakuti), Andrés exposes this situation, paying tribute to the long history of women placing life at the center and claiming it as a pillar of the political imagination to come.

Florencia Portocarrero, May 2021

Translated by Luciana Molina Barragán

Andrés Pereira Paz (*1986 en La Paz. Lives and works in Berlin) has extensively exhibited across Latin America, USA and Europe. Recently his works have been featured at 11th Berlin Biennale; Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin; The Ryder Projects and Gasworks, London; Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art, Riga; Kinderhook & Caracas, Berlin; National Museum of Art, La Paz; Second Grand Tropical Biennale, San Juan de Puerto Rico, a.o. He is due to have a solo presentation at Statements in Art Basel with Isla Flotante (Arg) this Fall and is shortlisted for the 6th edition of the Future Generation Art Prize. Pereira Paz is being represented by brunand brunand in Berlin, and Isla Flotante in Buenos Aires.

GALLI

Absage ans Paradies

Nov 11th, 2021 - Jan 8th, 2022

The monster appears in Galli’s paintings not as a specific psychoanalytic or mythological entity, but as an interface for painterly representation in general. Through it, she articulates a deeply enigmatic take on the body and its encounters with violence, desire, commodities, and animals, amongst many other things, interpolating these motifs in grotesque, if charming, amorphous figures and spaces.

Born in 1944 in Saarland, former West Germany, Galli established herself in the West Berlin art scene in the late 1970s and early 1980s. A contemporary to the Die Neuen Wilden in Germany, she rejected the rigidness of conceptual art in favor of gestural brushstroke and figuration with an expressive corporeality at its center. In the decades to come, Galli became a prominent fixture of her generation in Germany, presenting solo exhibitions in countless galleries as well as Forum Kunst Rottweil, the Bodensee Museum in Friedrichshafen, and the Salzburger Kunstverein. Last year her works were on view at the KW in the context of the 11th Berlin Biennale.

Galli’s first exhibition with brunand brunand presents 5 paintings and 5 drawings, most of them completed by Galli during her residency at the Villa Romana in Florence, Italy, in 1990. In addition, a group of 89 index cards drawn from ballpen is on display, a quick sketching method that the artist has employed throughout her prolific career.

Galli’s painterly strategy is at once visceral and self-reflexive; her forays into figuration are never presented without a commentary on the medium itself, a history she interrogates with a joyful and intellectual irreverence. Wer das Gelbe nicht ehrt (1981/1987) (“Who does not honor the yellow”) presents a nebulous and head-less grey body firmly holding onto a bone in front of a lemony yellow monochrome backdrop, while in Klassisches Getümmelbild (1990), a clump of abstract bodies assemble in commotion in front of a bi-chromatic color field suggesting a room or an architecture. As such, painting becomes a stage for confrontations between subject and form both haunted by history—be it art history or political history. Galli’s baroque figures, with their limbs protruding or seemingly multiplying, may allude to the grotesque corporeality of Goya and Rubens, but the artist transposes these into a one-dimensional, almost comic book-style contemporary, where they are allowed to shine, squirm, and be redeemed as proto-subjects. The morbid cartoon is most directly conveyed in her dramatic and narrative-heavy index cards, but it is also visible in Kentaur (für Schari!), 1990, where an amorphous horse-like figure with several human limbs seems to be nearly breaking through the enclosed space that surrounds it; its seemingly buoyant geist, conveyed in shades of red and ochre, is negated by the macabre motif that shows the creature stabbing its own arm with a knife and bleeding. Inversely, in o.T. (Monster von Firenze), 1990, a morbid scene depicts the notorious mass murder who in the 1990s traversed the streets of Florence, looming over one of his presumed subjects. Yet, with the artist’s wild-drawn lines, attention to the clutching of human hands, and generous use of crimson red, an erotic allegory feels pressing.

Galli explains her sudden employment of earth colors as a direct result of her time observing Tuscany’s landscape, and for registering the city of Florence itself. Rather than the postcard-like Renaissance city that many know it to be, the artist saw in its martial architecture, and dingy, narrow streets, the dark underbelly of the European humanist tradition of thought and of representation. Her deeply original morphology, transcending genre or style, are testaments to this antagonistic corporeal ethos: Galli’s bodies may be disfigured, mutated, disabled, but they all showcase an unmistakable lust and passion for life, for being and bodiliness in all its wondrous ambivalence.

Jeppe Ugelvig