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

ANNA UDDENBERG ~ Sante Par Aqua ~ Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin

Anna Uddenberg, Sante Par Aqua, Installation view, Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin, 2017.

ANNA UDDENBERG

SANTE PAR AQUA

Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin

04.11.2017–13.01.2018

At first glance, Anna Uddenberg's sculptures at the Sante Par Aqua (SPA) exhibition, at the

Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler gallery in Berlin, look like a fleet of swarmed spaceships ready to take off. But

they are also difficult seats. The Swedish artist presented a series of new works that recall a dystopian

world that is a mix of the TV series Black Mirror and Westworld.

In the first room there are three sculptures the size of three large armchairs. In the second room, two

glass walls, in which an artificial waterfall flows, form a cage inside which there is a large sculpture like

an alien presence, almost totemic.

The scalar and asymmetrical shapes insist on the dynamism of the object while the fabric in which they

are made returns sensuality to the coldness of the machine. In fact, the detachment from reality, the alienation,

is increased by the fact that the sculptures rise on a luminous base that seems to lift the sculpture in flight.

Anna Uddenberg, Sante Par Aqua, Installation view, Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin

The works are made with a combination of different materials: expanded polystyrene, acrylic resin,

fiberglass, polyurethane foam, HDF, automotive interior elements, synthetic leather, synthetic fur, vinyl

floor, hiking backpacks, foam strips of vinyl, along with different supports such as the hairdresser's chair.

Anna Uddenberg, who became famous thanks to her anthropomorphic sculptures, half human body

(* female) and half object (* commodity), like suitcases and buggies, extends her research in a direction

that concerns architecture and space as a social body .

The SPA is a neutral place, dedicated to the care of the body, but also a social space. A cradle of

well-being where the body has become itself a goods, an object of luxury, far from real welfare and the

right to health.

The ostentation of luxury becomes the negation of the reality of the body, its heaviness and its true needs.

Moving further her research from her previous body of works, Anna Uddenberg crates machines, that

have lost the human part, not because they have introjected it, but because they are completely missing.

On the contrary, it almost seems that they ask the visitor to be completed, to be assembled. These

machines are virtually move in a dimension that sees the imagination as a viable sea.

On the contrary, in line with the previous works, Anna Uddenberg's sculptures relate to the surface, not as

a general concept, but as a specific subject: the sculptural surfaces so captivating at first glance, actually

hide a patient hand-stitching work. A bit like our 'surreal' concept of well-being hides a series of

unrealistic real needs that are completely trapped in the unneeded.

Anna Uddenberg, "Pockets Obese", mixed media, Courtesy Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin, 2017.