Collection Spring 2023 @ balenciaga NY ~ May 23, 2022

Balenciaga showed its Spring 2023 collection on the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange.

This hits me: the very elegant transformation of humans into fetishes as they just leaft the BDSM club or the office is the same, makes no difference, ah, maybe they had just been robbed...

"The biggest and most important challenge for any kind of creative is to make product that is desirable, to create desire. That's what fashion should do," Demna says for BOF “The commercial success of a product is linked to that desirability. That's the biggest and most difficult thing." 

What does it mean to desire? What are beauty, success, power, money if they are a fetish? And then how do you want it?

Beauty is the last bulwark of fetishism,

a sexualized object. 

This representation gives an illusion of pleasure, a promise of happiness, but it is not happiness that it does want. It wants to sell a product!

The sexualization of the fetish object solidifies in us the idea of sexuality as objectification, pleasure as an object, for which we too want to be objects, fetishes, so to be loved and desired. Accepted.

This is truly the very opposite of pleasure, love, which arise from desiring as a free and independent action.

This superimposed rule can be reversed today.

If I am a fetishized object and I am trapped in the web of other people's desire, In the (vain) promise that one day I will be freed, I will be happy, I will be perfect, what if this fetish then one day really frees itself?

May we have to go to hell and come back to find out

Apart from the fact that I hadn't finished digesting the plastic bags in the snow anyway, here it is, Balenciaga did it again!

   

Katharina Grosse, It Wasn’t Us until 10 January, 2021 / A special exhibition of the Nationalgalerie / Staatliche Museen zu Berlin / Hamburger Bahnhof Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin - Xibt Contemporary Art Magazine

Katharina Grosse, It Wasn't Us * XIBT Contemporary Art Mag

A special exhibition of the Nationalgalerie - Staatliche Museen zu Berlin Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart - Berlin by Elda Oreto Katharina Grosse turns the world into a canvas and everything into a work of art, the exhibition "Katharina Grosse: It Wasn't Us", curated by Udo Kittelmann and Gabriele

Catherine Biocca, Milky Seas / PSM, Berlin - Xibt Contemporary Art Magazine

Catherine Biocca, Milky Seas / PSM, Berlin * XIBT Contemporary Art Mag

The methods of verbal communication allow for an aggression that permanently affects our feelings. Even when these words are not directly addressed to us. Catherine Biocca in the solo-show Milky Seas presented at the PSM Gallery in Berlin, investigated the mechanisms of fear, aggression and violence that are continuously and more or less subtly part of our daily life.

Émilie Pitoiset / MANIAC - Xibt Contemporary Art Magazine

Émilie Pitoiset / MANIAC * XIBT Contemporary Art Mag

In the MANIAC exhibition, at the gallery Klemm's in Berlin, from 10 September to 24 October 2020, the French artist Émilie Pitoiset investigated the way in which the control over our body movements, and particularly dancing, are the manifestation of the acceleration linked to mechanisms and relations built by the expansion of a capitalist system.

Monster Chetwynd, if spirits and demons become reality - Xibt Contemporary Art Magazine

Monster Chetwynd, if spirits and demons become reality * XIBT Contemporary Art Mag

Rite of passage, liberation, space of rupture, limits, chaos, law, life, order, death, identity, masks, high culture and popular culture, ancient and modern, serious and humorous are all elements the British artist, Monster Chetwynd, mixes in her artistic research that swings between the magical ritual and the social experiment, creating an atmosphere that feels as if we are between a village festival and the Ancient Greek Theater.

K.H. Hödicke at Palais Populaire - Xibt Contemporary Art Magazine

K.H. Hödicke at Palais Populaire * XIBT Contemporary Art Mag

Frantic flashing neon signs overflow from the gray facades of concrete buildings and intertwine in a constellation of advertising posters and glimpses of underground life in Berlin, almost a ghost town, sweet and dark, this is the scenario created by Karl-Horst Hödicke in his inexhaustible artistic practice.

Art Basel to launch second edition of its Online Viewing Rooms - Xibt Contemporary Art Magazine

Art Basel to launch second edition of its Online Viewing Rooms * XIBT Contemporary Art Mag

The art world has been reacting to this expansion for some time now and, even before the crisis that has been brought by the pandemic, it has been looking for new possibilities that open up to a wider audience. In this perspective, Art Basel Art fair is launching two new independent editions of its online version, in September and October 2020.

Interview with Johan Holten, Director of the Kunsthalle Mannheim * XIBT Contemporary Art Mag

Interview with Johan Holten, Director of the Kunsthalle Mannheim * XIBT Contemporary Art Mag

Johan Holten, Director of the Kunsthalle Mannheim since 2019 and formerly Director of the Kunsthalle Baden-Baden since 2011, reacted to this moment of crisis, since the beginning of the lockdown, with determination and promptness, proposing a series of online guided tours through the Live platforms of Instagram and Facebook.

The Quantification Trilogy of Jeremy Shaw / Julia Stoschek Collection - Xibt Magazine Online

The Quantification Trilogy of Jeremy Shaw * XIBT Contemporary Art Mag

How could we imagine the human body if not as a door or a vehicle, as something that can be crossed and that crosses, perhaps a path but it is also its own obstacle in a dialectic of growth.

The dream of life in the magical reality of Petrit Halilaj - Xibt Contemporary Art Magazine - 08/20

The dream of life in the magical reality of Petrit Halilaj * XIBT Contemporary Art Mag

The artistic research of Petrit Halilaj (born in Kostërrc, Skenderaj-Kosovo, in 1986) could be considered part of the artistic and literary current of the magical realism where reality and imagination, political and folklore elements, personal and collective memory are mixed.

The Upside-Down world of Yngve Holen | Xibt Contemporary Art Magazine | 02/2020

The Upside-Down world of Yngve Holen * XIBT Contemporary Art Mag

by Elda Oreto When I entered the world of Yngve Holen, I had the impression men were hybrids of flesh and synthetic material. It's as if the artist dreams of clandestine experiments in which the brain is injected with substances that induce hallucinations and excruciating headaches.

Sonia Gomes I Rise – I’m a Black Ocean, Leaping and Wide | Xibt Contemporary Art Magazine

Sonia Gomes I Rise - I'm a Black Ocean, Leaping and Wide * XIBT Contemporary Art Mag

Sonia Gomes never considered a career as an artist. She discovered her vocation by accident, long after she thought herself established in another occupation. Almost as if she had found her way after a long off-piste run.

THE WORLD ON PAPER: THE OPENING EXHIBITION OF THE PALAISPOPULAIRE | DEUTSCHE BANK COLLECTION | CURATED BY Friedhelm Hütte

Künstler I Artist: Maria Lassnig 

Titel I Title:

Portrait Arnulf Rainer, 1949

Pencil

31.5 x 45 cm

© Maria Lassnig Stiftung/Foundation

THE WORLD ON PAPER: 
THE OPENING EXHIBITION OF THE PALAISPOPULAIRE 
DEUTSCHE BANK COLLECTION 
CURATED BY Friedhelm Hütte
Until 7. January 2019


 The opening exhibition of the Palais Populaire in Berlin shows the infinite worlds of the media of paper in art : drawings, collages, watercolours etc from many contemporary artists, among which: Doug Aitken, Josef Albers, Richard Artschwager, Yto Barrada, Georg Baselitz, Thomas Bayrle, Joseph Beuys, Marc Brandenburg, Günter Brus, Michael Buthe, John Cage, Johanna Calle, Los Carpinteros, Carlfriedrich Claus, William N. Copley, Keren Cytter, Adriana Czernin, Hanne Darboven, Michael Deistler, Felix Droese, Marcel Dzama, Maria Eichhorn, Larissa Fassler, Parastou Forouhar, Günther Förg, Ellen Gallagher, Rupprecht Geiger, Isa Genzken, Hermann Glöckner, Ludwig Gosewitz, Katharina Grosse, Ivan Grubanov, Karl Haendel, EddiE haRA, Lucy
Harvey, Bernhard Heisig, Arturo Herrera, Eva Hesse, Rebecca Horn, Shirazeh Houshiary, Leiko Ikemura, Jörg Immendorff, Anish Kapoor, William Kentridge.
300 artworks for 133 artists, coming from 35 countries from the DB collection have been presented in the three floors palace in the center of Berlin.
The exhibition, curated by Friedhelm Hütte, shows the variety of DB collection.  In fact, the collection will be explored and interpreted in different ways all around 2019.
The museum presents under a nonconventional form, offering to visitors a wide range of ways to experience art from artist talks to guided tours, art workshops for kids to activities related to sport etc.
If you are abroad or for other reasons cannot experience the Palaispopulaire, it's possible to download an App on the cell phone to have a virtual guided tour through exhibition and to check the calendar of events.
The exhibition The World on Paper is subdivided into sections which take names from some artworks.
Among the work exhibited there is the Moondiver II (2018) by the Swiss artist Zilla Leutenegger. In the large drawing projected on the stairs at the entrance of the Palaispopulaire, a crane is lifting the Moon up like in an effective Trompe-l'oeil. In Higher beings Command a series of drawings by Sigmar Polke (1968),  that is also giving a name to a section of the show, the simple blank paper is the place where different abstract shapes take form. Moreover, there are also Raquib Shaw animal cosmos, Joseph Beuys everyday life collages, Andy Warhol cowboys comics, even the first drawings by Maria Lassnig etc.
 The World on Paper is not just a unique world but a constellation of to infinite universes coexisting at the same time.
The worlds of many artists are coexisting at the same time in what it seems like the philosophy of Giordano Bruno who in 500 century claimed the existence of more than one universe. For Bruno the infinite multitudes of worlds are connected together and artists as magicians could disclose to the others with a hermetic knowledge. 

Doug Aitken,  Ultraworld D, 2005,

Collage; printed paper, colored paper, cardboard, and tape in artist’s frame
Framed 39.6 x 50 x 4 cm, © Doug Aitken and Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zürich / New York

 Zilla Leutenegger, Moondiver II, 201, Wall drawing with video installation, projection, color, sound, 4 min., loop, Variable dimensions, © Zilla Leutenegger, courtesy Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich

 
Katharina Grosse, Ohne Titel, 1995, Oil, 9 parts, Total 300 x 240 cm,  © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2018

PHILIP KOJO METZ | THE BLACK KWADRAT @ KWADRAT, BERLIN | 11.11.2018 - 07.12.18

 

Philip Kojo Metz, The Black Kwadrat, Installation view, © KWADRAT-Gallery und Fotos by: Markus Georg

PHILIP KOJO METZ 
THE BLACK KWADRAT 
KWADRAT, BERLIN 
11.11.2018 - 07.12.18 

A  monolithic Black Box is filling up the space of Kwadrat gallery. It is almost impossible to walk in but for a narrow corridor that let the visitor surround the mysterious object.

Philip Kojo Metz ’s third exhibition at KWADRAT crisscrosses several forms of art. It also builds a multilayered structure which reminds a bit of the Chinese box system. It starts from Malevich to finish with the poet Alexander Pushkin, via the use of Social Media. Philip Kojo Metz, a German-Ghanaian artist resident in Berlin, focuses on overdrafts between forms of arts and topics with a strong performative attitude.

Near to The Black Kwadrat sculpture, there is a black hollow room. In fact, the two installations, the full box, and the empty space are complementary.

Visitors take place in the middle of the black room to get a photo portrait. This image is then posted on Instagram.

The Black Box installation is an homage to Kazimir Malevich, the Russian painter who lived at the beginning of 1900 and revolutionized the idea of Painting ( and Art ) with the Black Square, literally a black square painted on a white canvas.

Malevich’s paintings were a statement: painting as a representation of nature was over. The media of painting was free by the necessity of representing something.

It was the time to move in a new direction: abstract painting. That’s where it starts Modern Art.

Now, the Black Kwadrat is ironically provoking a possibility of change too. The social experiment, with the Instagram, it shows the possibility to free the Art from certain ‘social’ constrictions. Differently, from other art projects which used Instagram as an experimental channel, for example, Richard Price or Amalia Ulman, Kojo Metz’s project works like a magic tool that swallows the visitors to project their virtual self into the web.

Near the black walls, it is hanging a painting: a piece of wall with a gunshot hole in it.

The gallerist Martin Kwade told me that the idea was to shot a wall inside the gallery, but of course, this was not possible. The shooting is a direct quotation to a Pushkin short novel, The Shot, which is connected to the tragic duel that caused the writer’s death.

The last deathly shot eternalized him while the shooting in the gallery is harmless but delivers the visitors image into the perpetual flow of social networks.

In front of the Black Box, the visitor is almost a primitive hominid in front of the Monolith in Kubrick’s movie “2001: A Space Odyssey", from the novel of Arthur C. Clarke.

In the original story, the strange object came from nowhere, from the depth of the space. No one knows what it is and no one knows what is it for. But it does something: it triggers the primitives men to use the weapon.

Philip Kojo Metz, The Black Kwadrat, Installation view, © KWADRAT-Gallery und Fotos by: Markus Georg

STEVE BISHOP | DELIQUESCING | KW INSTITUTE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART | BERLIN | 3 NOV 18 – 6 JAN 19

Steve Bishop, installation view of the exhibition

Deliquescing, installation in five parts, KW Institute for

Contemporary Art, Berlin, 2018, photo: Frank Sperling

Courtesy the artist and Carlos/Ishikawa, London

STEVE BISHOP 
DELIQUESCING 

CURATOR ANNA GRITZ

ASSISTANT CURATOR MAURIN DIETRICH

KW INSTITUTE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART 
BERLIN 
3 NOV 18 – 6 JAN 19  

“I like to remember things my own way. How I remembered them, not necessarily the way they happened.”  Fred Madison, Lost Highways.

Memory betrays, deceives. We all know this. Reality is constantly manipulated, rewritten, even invented.  The truth is stretched from one side to the other. It's even ourselves to deceive ourselves. In some cases the memory slips away like water in a tap drain. But what are we without our memories? 
In the exhibition Deliquescing the British artist Steve Bishop speaks of memory through its alteration par excellence: Alzheimer's disease. 
The exhibition, curated by Anna Gritz and co-curated by Maurin Dietrich, consists of a large site-specific installation. The entire KW's floor is transformed into a simulated waiting room for a paradoxical laboratory. The entrance to the rooms is obstructed by plastic curtains. As soon as you enter the space a spectral atmosphere envelops you. A soft and opaque moist is embracing everything.
In the first room there is a wall covered with shelve which exposes a line of big rocks, wrapped in plastic, with small numbers on them, probably a date. On some of the rocks, puffy white mushrooms have flourished. They seems to have healing properties for Alzheimer's disease. As a matter of fact, these mushrooms are created by a particular mold that, thanks to the humidity, exudes a liquid that becomes the white puffy fungus. The exhibition refers precisely to the transforming capability of memory that fluidly takes different forms.
Next to the wall with the mushroom, there is a small monitor where it scrolls a report of a woman in an early phase of Alzheimer's. The woman tells her experience and her feelings about being ill and about her relationship with her mother, who was also ill. She explains that she often pretends to recognise people when she talks to them. And when she was a child she used to lie to her mother, when she "forgot" her father's death, making up a story just to make her happy.
In the next room, a film shows a deserted town in northern Canada, built in 1981 to house the workers of a nearby mine and then abandoned in 1983. Nowadays only a guardian lives there. His job is to prevent nature from taking over, in a constant effort not to fall into oblivion. In the corridors between the two spaces a thin transparent curtain is covering the original KW's walls. Through we could see some photos of the abandoned town. Near the exit, two huge freezers keeps the large moldy rocks. 
These rocks are not our memories, but the emotions that anchor us to them. The whole installation of Bishop is a bit of a reproduction of our inner state. Feelings are resting in a corner ready to be defrosted. But once outside, exposed to the mistiness of thought and life they are transformed and liquefied, producing something else.

Steve Bishop, installation view of the exhibition

Deliquescing, installation in five parts, KW Institute for

Contemporary Art, Berlin, 2018, photo: Frank Sperling

Courtesy the artist and Carlos/Ishikawa, London

Steve Bishop, installation view of the exhibition

Deliquescing, installation in five parts, KW Institute for

Contemporary Art, Berlin, 2018, photo: Frank Sperling

Courtesy the artist and Carlos/Ishikawa, London

Steve Bishop, installation view of the exhibition

Deliquescing, installation in five parts, KW Institute for

Contemporary Art, Berlin, 2018, photo: Frank Sperling

Courtesy the artist and Carlos/Ishikawa, London

CALL OUT TOOLS | GROUP SHOW BY ALEXANDER CARVER, PIETER SCHOOLWERTH, AVERY SINGER @ KRAUPA-TUSKANY ZEIDLER, Berlin 29.09 -27.11.2018

ALEXANDER CARVER, For an Open and Sustainable Society, 2018, oil and acrylic on canvas, 167.64 x 220.98 x 3.81 cm, unique
Photo: Gunter Lepkowski
Courtesy the artist; Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin

CALL OUT TOOLS 
ALEXANDER CARVER, PIETER SCHOOLWERTH, AVERY SINGER  
KRAUPA-TUSKANY ZEIDLER 
Berlin 29.09 -27.11.2018

Painting disengage.

Last friday it was a very sensitive weekend - besides the Berlin Art Week-.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was in Berlin trying to repair a connection with Bundeskanzlerin Angela Merkel. On the contrary all the streets of the city have been closed or interrupted because of his coming.It was total chaos.

After jumping from a bus to another I managed to reach the gallery Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler in Kohlfurter Straße to see the impressive show CALL OUT TOOLS with works of Alexander Carver, Pieter Schoolwerth and Avery Singer.

Entering the gallery space one has the impression to cross another dimension. The three New York based artist worked on the idea to re-invent the public space. Paintings are in this sense the physical-imaginary-places to project and process scattered elements of our contemporary society.

“Call Out tools for auto-cad” is written on a yellow post-it painted over “For an Open and Sustainable Society” (2018) by Alexander Carver. This is a painting of a draft for a Si-fiction building. The painting reproduces an architectural image is a sketch for a futuristic utopian city. 
What is at stake in the exhibition is the possibility of preserving a space of individual freedom in a context where the sphere of the public and shared informations invades our daily psychology.

The tension between art and order against reality and chaos is also visible in the painting “Reputation Demolition on Dereliction Island” (2018) by Avery Singer. Here, the division between private and public space becomes a very thin veil of violent words that separates the visitor from the image depicted. Through the transparency of the veil we could see two humanoids sitting in a corner in a in a three-dimensional grid. These figures seem to be imprisoned by the veil of words as in a curse. Or maybe the curse is for us because we are unable to cross reality for a fictional space.

Other kind of humanoid shapes are trapped in an elaborate and thick compositional space in the works of Pieter Schoolwerth. This time the works are intensely colorful. Schoolwerth works are a stratified mix of multilayered images. In “Call Out Tools #00”, (2018), collage and mixed media, there are also included quotations to the other artists. Schoolwerth’s world seems more directly influenced by the heterogeneous aspects of contemporaneity; layers over layers the colored surface changes into a cover that is dragged away by the wind or lifted by the neglect of time, to show another form, and then another, and another, inexhaustibly, until only colored shapes are revealed.

Painting deceive.

The canvas is a place of projections or of construction of reality.

Painting reveal.

It is an imaginary space that subtracts from reality to return to to it. Reality escapes though.

In such a critical time the antidote to this dark and cynical cursed world may be those bright futuristic visions. 

ALEXANDER CARVER, PIETER SCHOOLWERTH, AVERY SINGER
exhibition view, Call Out Tools, Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin, 2018
Photo: def-image
Courtesy the artists; Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin

 

ALEXANDER CARVER, For an Open and Sustainable Society, 2018 (detail ), oil and acrylic on canvas, 167.64 x 220.98 x 3.81 cm, unique
Photo: Gunter Lepkowski
Courtesy the artist; Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin 

AVERY SINGER, Reputation Demolition on Dereliction Island, 2018, acrylic on canvas, 217.17 x 241.94 x 5.4 cm
unique, signed and dated on verso, Photo: Lance Brewer
Courtesy the artist; Kraupa-Tuskany-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin; Gavin
Brown’s enterprise, New York / Rome

ALEXANDER CARVER, PIETER SCHOOLWERTH, AVERY SINGER
exhibition view, Call Out Tools, Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin, 2018
Photo: def-image
Courtesy the artists; Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin

PIETER SCHOOLWERTH, Call Out Tools #1, 2018, oil, acrylic, and giclée print on canvas, 210.82 x 182.88 cm, unique
Photo: Stephen Faught
Courtesy the artist; Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin; Miguel Abreu
Gallery, New York

THE VITALIST ECONOMY OF PAINTING CURATED BY ISABELLE GRAW @ GALERIE NEU / MD72, BERLIN | 15.09.2018 – 07.11.2018

THE VITALIST ECONOMY OF PAINTING

The Vitalist Economy of Painting curated by Isabelle Graw
Installation view, Galerie Neu, Berlin, 2018, Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Neu, Berlin. 

CURATED BY ISABELLE GRAW
AT GALERIE NEU AND MD72
15.09.2018 – 07.11.2018 

Georgie Nettell, Torey Thornton, Ellen Cantor, Sarah Morris, Merlin Carpenter, Charline von Heyl, Valentina Liernur, Eric N. Mack, Christopher Wool, Amy Sillman

Jutta Koether, Josephine Pryde, René Magritte

Alex Israel, Wade Guyton, Eliza Douglas, Ken Okiishi, Rosemarie Trockel, Annette Kelm

Heimo Zobernig, KAYA (Kerstin Brätsch & Debo Eilers), Frank Stella

Avery Singer, Albert Oehlen, Jeanette Mundt, Jana Euler, Birgit Megerle 


There's something incredibly charming about the idea that a painting could have its own soul. I have found myself wondering that, for example, looking at Las Meninas by Diego Velázquez or Giorgio De Chirichos’ surrealist compositions.
In the exhibition The Vitalist Economy of Painting, at Galerie Neu and MD72, is actually possible to experience the magic power of paintings by Georgie Nettell, Torey Thornton, Ellen Cantor, Sarah Morris, Merlin Carpenter, Charline von Heyl, Valentina Liernur, Eric N. Mack, Christopher Wool, Amy Sillman, Jutta Koether, Josephine Pryde, René Magritte,  Alex Israel, Wade Guyton, Eliza Douglas, Ken Okiishi, Rosemarie Trockel, Annette Kelm, Heimo Zobernig, KAYA (Kerstin Brätsch & Debo Eilers), Frank Stella, Avery Singer, Albert Oehlen, Jeanette Mundt, Jana Euler, Birgit Megerle.
The extensive group show, curated by Isabelle Graw, professor of art theory and art history at the Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Kunst in Frankfurt and co-founder of Text zur Kunst, is coming after the publication of “The Love of Painting. Genealogy of a Success Medium”.
The Love of Painting talks about painting not as a media or a genre but as a Formation in foucauldian words. As many artists say, paintings have a quasi-subject presence. In someway they have a life of their own indipendent from their authos but inherited by them.
The exhibition is developed into six chapters throughout the two venues.
In Big Joy (2004) of Charline von Heyl a huge brown spot is stretching over the canvas almost as if the painting made itself.
The trace of the artist is like a magical aura. But this magical aura is the trace of the artist as a creator that is not present. It is a trace of an absence. Albert Oehlen painting is an example of this delicate balance. Oehlen gave up to his privileged role as author to let an outside occasion  ‘guides’ his hand: the event is the commercial exhibition. The Gold zur Gelb (2018) is a golden shape which reminds of a dollar symbol, establishing its own value as material and immaterial in the same time.
In Avery Singer’s Untitled (2018) the ethereal figure of the artist is appearing in a 4th- dimensional corner shaped perspective, of the surfaces covered in a red-blue grid.
A trace of the artist in her Persona, entangled in a network of private/public relations and social interactions is another important chapter of painting as a living formation. As is perceivable in Jeanette Mundt: Baby Like the Wind, (2018) where a big skull shape is the reproduction of a tattoo from the artist's partnere Ned Vena.
Time without the history of our actuality, mixes and remixes relationships, erases networks, forgets and returns the same and always different.
The canon of painting presented by Graw finds a very important aspect in the direct contamination with reality; the world outside the painting is directly entering into the surface of art as a re-juvinating element.
 Jutta Koether in Isabelle Bild #3 (2018), reproduced an image of the media: Angela Merkel looking thoughtfully at a painting of Monet the day of Trump’s inauguration. The reenactment in the painting shows Isabelle Graw in Merkel's place, but with flashy pink shoes, her back to the news. The viewer is forced to look at the painting into the painting, at the curator's back, mirroring the reality.
Birgit Megerle "Recreation" (2018), a girl, lying on a bed, looking through the painting, straight to the spectator is breaking the distance between reality and painting. The painting is at the same time truth and fiction.
In the exhibition the vitalistic energy is building up a structure that puts the artist in a special position respect to the consumerist economy. An artist is the one who can elude the yoke of the production chain but at the same time remain an active producer of the company. 
Rosemarie Trockel’ s “Color assistant, (2018) embodies this tension with a true-lue-coarse-knit woolen fabric that is covering the true painting. 
Anette Kelm's Red Stripes 1, (2018), shows the illusion and imperfection of reality through the contamination between of painting and photography.

Ken Okiishi, gesture/data ( feedback ), (2015), Heimo Zobering ohne Titel (1991), black box, KAYA (Kerstin Bratsch & Debo Eilers) drape Procession [Jake] (2017), and Frank Stella, Dawidgrodek I, (1971), show how extanded is  the relation between painting with different media. 
Stella's painting is from the series "Polish Village". It get his name after a synagogue destroyed by the Nazi. Stella presents a three dimensional composition in which different geometrical figures are matched together. Only the title points to an historical event while the funky composition is almost acting as a detonator.
The vitalist force (Bergson) at the origin of the painting releases an irrational fold that, characteristic of contemporary decadence, may also holds back the individual freedom. 

  

The Vitalist Economy of Painting curated by Isabelle Graw
Installation view, Galerie Neu, Berlin, 2018, Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Neu, Berlin.

The Vitalist Economy of Painting curated by Isabelle Graw
Installation view, Galerie Neu, Berlin, 2018, Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Neu, Berlin.

The Vitalist Economy of Painting curated by Isabelle Graw
Installation view, Galerie Neu, Berlin, 2018, Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Neu, Berlin.

The Vitalist Economy of Painting curated by Isabelle Graw
Installation view, Galerie Neu, Berlin, 2018, Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Neu, Berlin.

The Vitalist Economy of Painting curated by Isabelle Graw
Installation view, Galerie Neu, Berlin, 2018, Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Neu, Berlin.

The Vitalist Economy of Painting curated by Isabelle Graw
Installation view, Galerie Neu, Berlin, 2018, Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Neu, Berlin.

The Vitalist Economy of Painting curated by Isabelle Graw
Installation view, Galerie Neu, Berlin, 2018, Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Neu, Berlin.

The Vitalist Economy of Painting curated by Isabelle Graw
Installation view, Galerie Neu, Berlin, 2018, Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Neu, Berlin.