Opening: Friday, 11 April, 5–9pm
Curated by Dr. Martin Hentschel
SCHÖNEWALD is pleased to present the new group exhibition Hand-Picked – 33 Pieces of Contemporary Art.
Hand-picked: an exclusive and highly diverse selection of high-quality works. These include a selection of Bernd and Hilla Becher’s photographs of water towers and half-timbered and shingled houses – all taken from a strictly planimetric perspective. In this rigour, they stand alongside abstract works such as Josef Albers’s Homage to the Square and Ellsworth Kelly’s Black Green. Sabrina Fritsch’s geometric paintings, on the other hand, are based on complex codes that are difficult to decipher visually.
The exhibition also includes three works by Sigmar Polke, which oscillate between grid images and figurative allusions and are unsurpassed in their own unique quality. In particular, Meisterwerk als Ramsch versteigert (Masterpiece Auctioned Off as Junk) is a testament to Polke’s biting, exuberant humour, which always contains a grain of truth.
Gerhard Richter had already explored abstraction in various ways in the mid-1970s. His grey Vermalungen (Inpaintings) are a case in point. His Farbtafeln (Colour Charts) are structured in different ways, each creating a multi-coloured harmony. He takes a different approach with his brightly coloured, amorphous watercolours, which defy any overarching chromatic harmony. Gotthard Graubner’s large-format gouaches, on the other hand, live from a chromatic harmony that spreads evenly from the centre of the picture to the edges, and it is no coincidence that this led to the large-format Kissenbilder (Cushion Paintings).
The works of Katharina Fritsch and Karin Kneffel offer a figurative approach. While the former presents various everyday objects in a completely new way, creating an unsettling proximity, the latter stages a cheerfully ironic reckoning with patriarchy in her painting Ich hatte mit Küche und Kochen nichts am Hut (I Had No Interest in Kitchens or Cooking). By contrast, Elisabeth Peyton’s reproduction of a work by Eugène Delacroix focuses on the traditional image of women.
Thomas Schütte and Andreas Schmitten each find their own approach to the human environment. While Schmitten creates an image of human relationships that is aseptic and psychologically complex, Schütte’s Wichte (Imps) concentrate on typological portraits of invented characters. Finally, we find an unexpectedly reality-based approach in On Kawara’s Date Paintings. Inasmuch as each of them designates and elaborates only a single date, all the events that a world day can produce are included as it were, precisely because the painting contains no information about specific events.
© Martin Hentschel
(This text is released for unrestricted publication)
