ItIsOnlyAStareOfMind

›Was wir zeigen wollen‹

Etel Adnan, Harun Farocki, Stefan Hayn, Bertold Mathes, Michaela Melián, Sarah Schumann

Opening: Friday, February 21 / 7 p.m.
Exhibition from February 22 until May 4 2014

The exhibition with the programmatic title “Was wir zeigen wollen” provides an unconventional and cross-generational overview of practices, visual languages and gestures of showing and narrating in the medium of painting as well as in adjacent formats such as text and film. The invited artists represent a continuous confrontation with the possibilities offered by their chosen creative means. Personal stories and the circumstances of their works' time of creation are always reflected in their works as well.

With a wide selection of images Bertold Mathes (born 1957, Freiburg) provides an insight into the practice he has developed over many years. In his case, painting is a continuous test arrangement and is, on the basis of a kind of idiomatic grammar, constantly unfolded further and simultaneously questioned. His working in series is interrupted by single works, in which the artist seeks to go against the form of what he has elaborated. The artist's parallel output – drawn “index” sheets or “transfer” works on paper – testify to his intensive dealing with the possibilities of painting and of its history.

Work on idiomatic language also stands at the focus of the oeuvre of the author and painter Etel Adnan (born 1925, Beirut), who was a witness to the Lebanese civil war for a number of years. The artist finds her way to painting via the delimitation with literature. In contrast to writing – which she understands as something social, because we share the words with one another – painting, for her, signifies something spontaneous, free from social constraints.

Adnan's biography shows a similarity with that of Sarah Schumann (born 1933, Berlin): initially shaped by war (WW2), from which Schumann finds catharsis through art. She dealt with the image of woman right from her early shock collages and collaged female icons in images of destruction. After many travels she returned to Berlin in 1968, developed her own painting technique and joined the women's group “Brot und Rosen” (Bread and Roses). During this time she was also co-initiator of the NGBK exhibition of female artists, “Künstlerinnen International 1877-1977”, which was the first, in 1977, to provide a historically comprehensive overview of art by women.

The question of the implications of this commitment is addressed by Michaela Melián (born 1956, Munich) in her multimedia installation “Silvia Bovenschen und Sarah Schumann” (2012): alongside the artist's paintings she gives Sarah Schumann and her partner, the feminist author Silvia Bovenschen, a chance to speak. At the Heidelberger Kunstverein, Melián's installation is now for the first time being placed in relation to originals by Schumann.

In the 1978 television documentary “Ein Bild von Sarah Schumann”, Harun Farocki (born 1944, Nový Jicín) follows the creation of a typical figurative painting by the artist: he allows us to watch as, using the collage technique, she revises and integrates photography and painting. The amount of time Schumann puts into her artistic production is addressed in addition.

With “Malerei heute” (with Anja-Christin Remmert) the filmmaker and painter Stefan Hayn (born 1965, Rothenburg ob der Tauber) also creates a type of long-term documentary. Accompanied by texts, real scenes and experimental music, on the basis of plein-air watercolours he performs a personal narrative of the politically driven economic changes of the years 1998–2005. Painting becomes the starting material for a film that addresses processes of image-making and observing, the “painterly vision” itself. Hayn's latest film S T R A U B (2006–2014) focuses on the artist's personal confrontation with the oeuvre of the Marxist-leaning filmmakers Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet.

With “What we are trying to show” we wish, not least, to pose the question of how, in the selected complexes of works, expressive possibilities of text, film or curatorial work are refracted into painting or, conversely, how painterly discourses are resumed and reflected in other media.

Curated by *Barbara Buchmaier and Susanne Weiß

* Barbara Buchmaier (born 1975, Augsburg) is an art historian and works in Berlin as a freelance art historian, teacher and gallery employee. She writes, among others, for “ Texte zur Kunst” , “ Artforum.com” and the Berlin art magazine “ von hundert”.

This group exhibition is accompanied by a guided tour by the Curators in dialogue with the Artists on Saturday, February 22 at 5 pm (in german).
Bertold Mathes: 5 pm
Michaela Melián: 5.30 pm
Stefan Hayn: 6 pm

Sarah Schumann: "Silvia" 1977 (Silvia Bovenschen), colorphotography, colored photography, oil paint, cloth, Japanese Tissue

Bertold Mathes: "multiple choice-37", 1999, acrylic on canvas

Etel Adnan: Untitled, 2010, oil on canvas, courtesy the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut / Hamburg

Stefan Hayn: Untitled, oil on canvas, Stefan Hayn 2010/11, reproduced in Film "S T R A U B" (35mm/DCP, 72min., 2006-2014)