"Street's like a jungle
so call the police
following the herd
down to Greece..."
Blur, Girls and boys
A group of dummies dressed with a sort of waterproof plastic mantles and two children's
dummies with extra large T-shirts are the first bodies to emerge distinctly from the horde of
objects that fills up the nave of the former Brutalist-style church now home to the König galerie.
The dummies or Schauspieler are, one could say, a peculiar element of Isa Genzken practice.
The puppets are standing, as if conversing among themselves. On the wall near them are hanging
metal panels on which there are clippings of newspapers, photographs of the artist, of her life, of
works, of other exhibitions etcc. The collages are crowded by images like in one of those
movies where a detective is hunting a serial killer and pins all the clue on a board.
Adhesive tapes in bright colors coverü other panels. The stripes come and go from one side to
the other; they are an obstacle to the vision, containment tapes, which obscure the shimmering
surface of the metal. The tape is the restraint but also its own end. From this grid, however,
what transpires is not a glint of life but an irrepressible flow of energy.
The panels run around the space of the nave. All the other works are contained in it: sculptures
made of blocks of cement piled on one another or cut like scalar pyramids with strange steel
antennas, fake busts of Nefertiti with sunglasses and the dummies, which seem to compete with
visitors to gain space in the crowded monumental nave of the ex-church, built by Werner Düttmann
and restored by Arno Brandlhuber. Two dummies are laying on each other, as if making love.
and restored by Arno Brandlhuber. Two dummies are laying on each other, as if making love.
At the bottom of the nave, in right corner, there is a photograph portrait of the artist
Isa Genzken. "This foto was made at my first trip in New York 1971" is written on it.
She is the beginning of it. The starting point of the motion of energy. It crosses all things and
connects them to each other. The flow of desire generated by a young Issie overwhelms
everithing around her even herself. The energy does not come from an inner withdrawal of
the artist in her consciousness, but is the drift of the world around it. It cannot be triangulated.
Every work is a station, a ring, a conjunction, which stands for itself, indipendent, but also
together with the others.
A flow of desire is not always an idyll. The masked dummies, the actors, are the revealed
fiction, but also a transformation. Each identity is simulated.
The dummies are placed inside a forest of other images and sculptures like the vertical
blocks made of cement, this amorphous material at the base of most of the current buildings.
Cement, too, is a sign of transformation, in a sense it can become anything and be nothing.
Then there are the nefertiti with sunglasses that are a joke, a declassation.
The artist is often defined as a heir to constructivism but seems to overcome all definitions.
All the works in the exhibition are born in different moments of the artist's life. They are a
horde without control, pure desire, liberated, seen together like this; Those works placed in a
former church, symbol of the extreme repression exercised on the society by ideology they are
an explosive element.
This aspect of the exhibition impressed me very much.
The gallery is a place of folding up of the reality, often to propose a synthetic experience,
intensified of reality.
In this former church, the ideas of elevation, repression and sublimation, which belong to the
sacred place on one side and on the other the intensified experience of the artwork, slide on
another level. The emptiness of a form is turned into a "concrete" weight, bouncing ambitions,
desires and dreams, on a real dimension that brings back the flow of desire.
The church - gallery is not the place of perfection or of unfulfilled aspirations, projected on an
other-life that never comes. It is the ‘here and now’ of desire under the experience of art: the
endless stream of energy that always produces new axioms, that absorbs everything,
incorporates everything and everyone and of which Isa Genzken's horde is the interminable
external limit.
Isa Genzken ISSIE ENERGIE
11.11.17 - 7.1.2018
König Galerie, Berlin
www.koeniggalerie.com
