We are delighted to participate in the first edition of STAGE Bregenz.
Following the invitation of Elise Lammer, the gallery will show a solo presentation of the artist Bianca Phos in the Interplay section curated by Lammer. We are particularly pleased to announce the representation of Bianca Phos with this participation!

Consider that seemingly inert yet voracious time during the incessant feed scrolling of any given social media or online search. Minutes stretch like a vacuum or a gap in spacetime engulfing us into rivers of information. Meanwhile, our eyes restlessly gobble up images at the time our fingers rapidly pass them by up, down, swiping them left or right. Thoughts and visual cues jump from one to another, random, unconnected. Sometimes the glimpses are too fast even to grasp them. The immersion is exhausting though it creates a strange dependency. A reflex that sways between repulsion and crave, so that just after a short pause, one jumps back into that digital visual pool. […]

For Stones Grow Soft*, Minda Andrén builds these visual riddles from the embedment of found and borrowed images that she collects from a myriad of sources, including her private archive. The exhibition‘s title underlines the ludic manner in which she resignifies the original images into playful, intricate compositions that dislocate their original connotation into a posit of impossibilities: From fragments of Bruegel‘s engravings overlapping with Rock-flaming-Boots from a Willhaben ad to an enigmatic landscape with five head-in-theground vertical bodies elongating into abstract lines.  […]

*From the poem A Posit of Impossibilities by Walafrid Strabo in Silverstein, T. (1989). English Lyrics Before 1500 (York Medieval Texts. Second Series). Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press.

Lorena Moreno Vera, 2021


In his sculptures and video works, Kay Walkowiak delves into the correlation between time and space in existential reflection, contrasting Western and Eastern perceptions.

In antique Western philosophy, a man is a measure of all things (Protagoras), opposite to the non-anthropocentric Eastern philosophy view favoring man’s interconnection with the environment as part of a whole. Likewise, in many non-Western traditions, the perception of time is essentially cyclical; the beginning coincides with the end in contrast to the Western linear perception of time when each moment is qualitatively different from the one before. Touching on this topic, Kay emphasizes the Buddhist notion of the present moment urging us to ‘be here now.’ […]

Kay Walkowiak, Olesia Shuvarikova 2022

Michael Fanta’s work intertwines a crossover between the cinematic and the oneiric. His paintings capture snapshots of intriguing settings onto small formats, which restage the viewer‘s position from the voyeur to an active participant. These scenes unfold through abstract characters, random situations, and caption cues. !e resulting narratives thus question whether it is only the artist‘s fantasy or the viewer‘s projection.

Fanta’s paintings reflect this enfant terrible who likes to dig into the absurdity of everyday life with a witty twist. In Climax, 2020, No Sleep, 2019-2020, and Eye Contact, 2020-2022 he shows multiple outlooks of different sexual encounters: from a comic-like Italian shout of pleasure #oating across the room to two rather amusing viewpoints from each sexual partner‘s perspective—one of them blurred either by sweat or movement. Likewise, Balloon, 2021 depicts the absurd struggle between a girl and a balloon trying to have sex in vain. Both express their frustration at the impossibility and clumsiness of the act as they carry on.

His canvases are clippings of intimate recollections as if they pop up in the memory and appear frozen at the moment of intrigue. In a different direction come the Icelandic blue series, such as Fisk (Midnight in Reykjavik), 2015-21, where a finger reaches out hesitantly to buzz the doorbell lit by a cold blue light. One can picture the situation: the afterparty thrill driven by the rush that only the blurriness of alcohol and the cold air blowing on the face can bring. Yet, this same rush fills the need to go to that final stop before reaching home seeking for that one last attempt. The outcome is unknown. 

The works appear like fragments of stories in the middle of the action, creating anticipation for the next moment and intrigue about the unsaid beginning. Like every good story, it demands many try-outs and re-writings, a time to settle, which is why his pictures inform of the twists and turns of constant overwork after the starting notes. Each painting is thus the sum of several narrative layers poured by the artist.

Lorena Moreno Vera, 2022

In the exceptionally hot June of this year, 6 snakes were found in various toilets of residential apartments in Austria. The snakes had slithered from neighboring apartments, through the sewage system of apartment buildings into other people‘s toilets. It was so hot, that the tiled dark toilets assured them cooling. Two snakes bit the unknowing people, who were sitting down, in their genitals leading to poisonings.

This happening reminds me of the nature of fear. You can‘t help it, it appears and attacks you, and it‘s also not rationally attainable in its form.

When someone experiences fear, rationality stops. If you are afraid of a snake biting your vagina, it doesn‘t help to rationally disprove this fear with likelihood. So what happens when an absurd fear suddenly becomes reality? You feel validated. You enter a space, a sphere, where you have finally arrived in your irrationality. The abstraction becomes the object. The images that made no sense to others suddenly become accessible. Suddenly one has room to focus on other things - on the essential, one can organise memories, and process images. The abstraction, so to speak, is now pulled onto the level of the figurative, and becomes readable.

I no longer see only the snake in the toilet, I see images, and become free. Free in my interpretation of reality.
I wouldn‘t go so far as to call it healing - the present becomes accessible. I see images blurred by the flushing of the toilet, I see possibilities to make use of reality in order to step out into something more elevated. Should I take a vacation? What‘s the point? The thoughts, they‘re the same there too. It‘s enough for me to understand the imagery as a kind of vacation. A vacation from fear. An escapism of feelings that stick and stick to the ceramic surface, I just brush them away, and through it, I brush my new reality. Far from the purging misfit that hides, far from the nervous stomach that inevitably keeps checking in. Narcissus who observes himself in the reflection of the coloured water by the cleaning fluid assures his existence. Narcissus has needs, even if they are torn into ridiculously small paranoid shreds into a functioning sewage system compared to the big picture. Ophelia drifts passively in the unpoetic modern reality, in the soup of everyday life. Our importance will sink too, that is certain.

Edin Zenun's Conman, 2021, reflects on the conjunctures that shift identity. The cement steles speak of failed architectures resulting from ideological clashes and their obsolete agendas, but mostly of how these projects yielded to expunged names and memories hand in hand with the transfiguration of cityscapes: all for the sake of power. 

His sculptures resemble the ruins or debris of a torn/sunk cathedral, where just the towers would remain standing. Decay gnaws the material and speaks of failed ideological remains by the time that natural erosive processes engulf them—the ruin located in the interval between the corpse and the innovation.

Change and cataclysm, rinse and repeat in continuous cycles as an eternal pursuit of something new from those ruined fragments; the future as a simulated promise, a haunt. Yet, is it even possible? Are we even capable of fully escaping their reminiscence at all?  Instead, we just "sample" them. We take the rightful 5 - 11 seconds of those fragments and retune them into unsuspected ways. Resignification opposed to oblivion. 

Sadly The Future Is No Longer What It Was.

Leipzig—Love Declarations

In this series, Zenun renders a heartfelt homage to other painters, setting as a background one of their works to slowly re-shape it, efface it, tame and hide some of its features with turpentine and white layering. The paintings turn out as an intimate encounter between Zenun and the other artist. The conversation becomes visible from the traces of wet cloth, the washed-away smudges from the gestures of erasure, along with some delicate carving all superposed in white transparency, Mild und Leise.

Zenun delves into the instant gesture and embodied mood in the act subdued through the mixture of clay and natural pigments that imprint a hue. Nonetheless, this pictorial submission does not quiet the works down; on the contrary, they outstand for precisely their peculiar patina, their subtlety, which in contrast to industrialized, homologized, perfectly attuned pigments, Zenun's colors utter a statement.

Zenun compares painting to a seismograph, a perfect registration of those nuances that permeate in the brushstroke or in the sound of that played note. "Painting is poetry. Shapes rhyme with each other, colors rhyme with each other."  

Lorena Moreno Vera, 2021

During his studies at the HfBK Dresden mainly active as a painter, Tilman Hornig’s (*1980) work today is characterized by a strong medial diversity, the constant interweaving with contemporary phenomena and thus also digital image worlds. The further development and deepening of motifs in ongoing groups of works is based on a conceptual approach, which, however, manages without pathos or claim to truth due to the free, almost playful implementation in different scenarios and formats. Exemplary for this artistic practice is the group of works “GlassPhone,” begun in 2014. A simple, glass object is readable here solely through its form as a smartphone and Hornig stages it accordingly as an applied sculpture.

Digital photographs and videos show omnipresent situations: Women and men hold the fictitious device in their hands, stretch it out to take a photo, look at the supposed screen, wipe their fingers across the transparent surface, scroll through an invisible feed or type a message.

These are strikingly unspecific and yet even more familiar motifs that evoke the clear aesthetics of advertising and stock photography. Also because people and places step back behind the object to give space to a universal truth. The device abstracted here into a symbol is real for almost everyone everywhere - in the private bedroom, in a café, in a museum, on a plane, in public urban space, in nature - and still remains only a tool for the virtual world.

By throwing back the symbol of digital space, limitless communication, infinite information to its purely material form, Hornig makes the paradoxical cultural elevation visible. For the device as such is free of any content, it is a neutral surface and at no time permanent. Only at the moment of use does it transfer the surrounding reality into a virtual illusion of the same, thus becoming a mirror of countless, varying realities. The transparency of the “GlassPhone” refers to the actual function of the smartphone as a transmitter of information and translator between the worlds.

The complex and ever-increasing overlap of analog and digital realities is touched in the current exhibition “Silent Night” on a formal as well as on a content-related level. It shows 24 variations of a motif from the “GlassPhone” series. In the darkness of an airplane cabin - as the characteristic oval window hatch in the center lets us know - the human body disappears almost completely. Only the hand holding the sculpture is illuminated by the mystical light in the center of the picture, while the “GlassPhone” itself crosses the additional picture surface enclosed by the window frame in an almost perfect diagonal.The precise, harmonious composition differs in its execution only in this second picture surface, the landscape to be imagined, and especially the atmosphere of light that radiates inwards and frames the sculpture-like an aureole. Golden sunrises or sunsets, rosy pastel evening moods, deep blue night skies, or greenish shimmering auroras create stylized hyper-realities. They reveal that this motif was digitally mounted.

In the repetition of the perfect pictorial structure, a sharp artificiality lurks, leading away from the motif and back to the abstract, conceptual level of the workgroup. The compositional exaggeration - the superimposition of the glass surfaces as transitions to an actual and a virtual reality, which at first glance can quickly be interpreted - is given a surprising twist by this disclosure. A distinction between real and artificial, analog and digital, is of course no longer possible. Indeed, even the categories “real” and „artificial“ no longer seem valid, since virtual content has a very real influence on life. Information flows today run in both directions and creates equal realities.

Katarina Lozo, 2020

The idea to pick up on something foreign, maybe unfamiliar. Little still lifes one can find in a friend‘s bathroom, like the array of cherished perfumes or carelessly scattered jewellery. Details in people, the gesture of an acquaintance, things around us, something intriguing, appealing. An intimate moment, an instant of voyeurism: the thought of helping oneself to someone else‘s reality. These are fictitious, poetic journeys Charlotte Klobassa takes you on. 

Painted arches on the walls resembling arcades, a counter and stools reminiscing of Greek columns. Oversized brushstrokes, fading drops of paint, powerful and timid lines. Enlarging and distorting, Klobassa imitates painterly elements on the canvas, which she selects from innumerable collected templates and sets in a new context. Strokes, lines, numbers, whole words or lettering, as well as comic-like subjects - all forgotten, abandoned scribbles, insignificant impressions. They are scanned, identified, categorised and compiled in order to enter into new relationships with each other. The charm of the unknown, fantasising about intentions, thoughts and moods, the interpretation of forms. The result is a game with classical painterly genres - on closer inspection, supposed abstraction becomes a portrait or landscape, expressiveness a realistic representationalism, coincidentally a pathetic gesture. 

The paintings of Dejan Dukic take on an abstract, shifting, and unrecognisable form. At first the painting’s surface may be confused with the hardening of a fibre, a mollusc, lichen, a grid, a cityscape, or some organic form adhering into a composition. This plurality and scope emerges from Dukic’s constant experimentation with material that follows long investigations into tactile visualisations. The forms are an expression of abandonment to material, the ability to shake off artistic control in favour of collaboration with the tools of the artist – in this case, casting off the easel, paintbrush, and palette in favour of the base symbolic and historically loaded materials of painting – paint and canvas.

In his films, photographs and sculptures, Kay Walkowiak draws on formal languages of Western art and cultural history found in the common picture archive and – following a modus of drawing playful contrasts – relates them to everyday situations in various cultural contexts, particularly those of the Asian region. He thereby exposes divergent spatial and temporal concepts, explores the cultural character of perception and deciphers visual forms as projection surfaces of narratives of Western cultural history and the utopias associated with them.

Rituals of Resistance

Since the Renaissance monkeys have been regarded as symbols of art. „Ars simia naturae“, art is the monkey of nature. An illustration of this Latin saying can be seen, for example, in a painting by Giovanni Bellini in Milan‘s Brera: A monkey sits on a pedestal in the background of the painting on which the painter has affixed his signature.
Since the 1950s there have been attempts to test the creativity of monkeys, since a time in which tachism and gestural painting broke the laws of form and artistic creativity was lost in control and carefree spontaneity. was suspected. Usually minimalism as a means of distance. The aesthetics of reduction seem to rest on rationality and the ability to analyze, which is why these types of art are regarded as opposed to immediate and carefree experience. And yet the carefree handling of the material by the monkeys teaches a different lesson.
With reference to the early history of visual colonial ethnography at the beginning of the 20th century, in which photography was used as a research tool, the establishment and composition of „Rituals of Resistance“ reconstructs this style of documentation. The monkeys degrade the minimalist Western artworks as mere objects by dwelling on them in lofty-looking „rituals of resistance“: They occupy the glory of the supposedly higher intellectual culture of the West.

Unscripted Deviations

The utopias that Walkowiak examines in his works have been given an architectural form in the planned city of Chandigarh, India. Chandigarh was built in the mid- 1950s, after India had regained its independence from Great Britain, to plans by the Swiss-born architect Le Corbusier. At the time of its construction, the city – whose design was based on elementary geometric forms, characterised by steel and concrete and guided by the principle of functionality – was regarded as symbolic of India’s striving for modernity.
Although today the planned city, whose concept was committed to the idea of establishing a new Indian social order, is seen as an explicit example of Eurocentric imperialism, Walkowiak’s works do not formulate a criticism of the utopian visions expressed by the buildings’ architecture and the interior design. Rather, his video works expose these ideas by illuminating the way the city is used by the Indian population – which often runs counter to the conception of the city – and by contrasting the idea, inherent to the architecture, of a “timelessness of form” with the decay of the city.
Chandigarh’s increasing deterioration – which reveals itself in, among other things, nature’s creeping reconquest of its buildings – is addressed by Kay Walkowiak in the photographs of the 2017 series Unscripted Deviations. These images show close-up shots of blackened, cracked façades in which the monsoon rains have left their marks and wasps have nested. With its hexagonlike honeycomb structure, the wasps’ nest as a natural form of “architecture” seems to evoke the planned city of Chandigarh and its strict division into individual sections just as much as it contradicts it. The exhibited photographs – resemble vanitas depictions of the utopian visions associated with Chandigarh.

Waterfall

Waterfall tells the story of a young woman who is in love with Marcel Duchamp and sets off in search of the artist’s spirit in a Taiwanese city and its environs. In the individual sequences of the film, the woman – seemingly without realising it herself – not only becomes a personification of motifs from Duchamp’s works; even her day-to-day life is increasingly interwoven with themes from the artist’s aesthetic and intellectual world, which is subtly superimposed over her surroundings like a second plane of reality.
In the video Duchamp’s spirit permeates the young woman’s presence, possessing potent power in the now despite the artist’s absence. The film thereby lends a lyrical expression to a phenomenon for which Jacques Derrida coined the term hauntology: the ghost-like, cyclical return in the present of what is actually absent.
This phenomenon is addressed by Kay Walkowiak at the very beginning of Waterfall by means of a close-up view of a phonograph record and the associated symbolism of the rotating circular shape. The record’s label is a reference to Marcel Duchamp’s 1935 work Rotoreliefs, thus identifying the artist as that ghost “whose expected return repeats itself, again and again.” Walkowiak’s video work follows this “logic of haunting” and shows the protagonist in various everyday situations in which she attempts to summon Duchamp’s spirit through rituals rooted in her cultural context, but which also suggest works or thoughts of the artist.
In one scene, for example, the young woman performs a Chinese tea ceremony on the rooftop of her building. The positioning of the teacups corresponds to the arrangement of the holes in the urinal of Duchamp’s 1917 Fountain, probably his most famous readymade. But the cups, which the protagonist fills with milk, also recall the “malic molds” of what Duchamp called the “Bachelor Machine” in the lower section of his La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même (Le Grand Verre) [The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass)] from 1915-1923. While the “malic molds” are, according to Duchamp, filled with illuminating gas, the alternative use of milk has symbolic meaning as well: placed next to the depiction of the “bride” in the upper section of Duchamp’s work is the so-called “Milky Way.” This kind of penetration of both cultural and temporal stratifications characterizes all the scenes in this film, whether it is the woman laying out the round pieces of a Chinese chess game in a park – hoping to thereby enter into a dialogue with the passionate chess player Duchamp – or whether she is shown cleaning a temple figure whose distinctive face painting recalls Duchamp’s 1919 readymade L.H.O.O.Q., in which the artist added a mustache and pointed beard to a postcard reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. In one of the film’s final scenes, the young woman sits in a decrepit hotel with broken, dirty panorama windows that again evoke Duchamp’s Large Glass, while in the background the eponymous waterfall can be seen.
Waterfall approaches the question of how we love: Do we love the person or the qualities of a person? Do we just love without wanting something in return or are we longing for a feeling of being loved? What or how do we love if we love someone who might not be existing with a solid physical body anymore?

Case Study Object (#1)

Kay Walkowiak approaches the question of the timelessness and narrative conceivability of form on the basis of the differing culture-historical mentalities of East and West. “The traveler leaves no trace because he keeps pace with the movement of things,” is the comment of the philosopher Byung-Chul Han on an old Chinese saying, and thereby refers to a Far Eastern tradition of the relationship with form that, in contrast with the Western form, primarily conceived of as substance, is oriented to real absence. Walkowiak sounds out the historically and socio-culturally characterised approach to form and questions its functional positing as a projection surface for timeless utopias. The traveler abides for a moment between being and becoming. Form loses its substance and, through its emptiness, space expands: everything hangs in the balance between concrete reality and absolute utopia.

In a new space-filling installation, Kay Walkowiak is discussing and renegotiating the intimate network of relationships between subject and art object as a power structure of desire and aversion.

Through the art history of painting, primary materials such as canvas and paint, traditionally covered with meaning, form the elementary components of his sculptural objects, which he conceives as a set display for the viewer and subsequently open up a choreography of references to the canon of forms in minimalist painting.

In einer neuen raumgreifenden Installation stellt Kay Walkowiak das intime Beziehungsgeflecht als Machtgefüge aus Begehren und Aversion zwischen Subjekt und Kunstobjekt zur Diskussion und verhandelt es neu. 

Durch die Kunstgeschichte der Malerei traditionell mit Bedeutung belegte Primärmaterialen wie Leinwand und Farbe bilden die elementaren Bestandteile seiner skulpturalen Objekte, die als gesetzte Displays für die Betrachter eine Choreografie der Referenzen auf den Formenkanon der minimalistischen Malerei eröffnen.