KAI RICHTER – SOMEWHERE IN BETWEEN

The materials – wood, metal and concrete – Richter uses for his sculptures and assemblages refer to the process of building. Some titles like Das schwarze Dreieck (2017) or Barnett (2017) correlate with well-known names in art history. Richter encounters the specific qualities of the varied materials and artistic positions with curiosity. He questions and explores their potential in order to utilize and to develop it. In his understanding artistic practice means observation and experimentation.
While Richter has to respect gravity and statics with his wall works and sculptures, the collages open up a more fantastic sphere. The impossible gets designed and built in these two-dimensional collages. But works like Sonde (2017) or Prop (2017) show that there is only a fine line between fragility and stability, between imbalance and balance, in other words between conceived and constructed works. Hence Sonde stalks on thin scaffolding poles through the entrance area of the gallery while Prop seems to lean weightlessly against the wall.
In the adjacent room of the gallery, the work Das schwarze Dreieck made of brittle and awkward construction materials demonstrates how Richter uses simplicity and clarity of form to elicit sensual aspects of the material. Even though there is accordance and harmony there is also a certain unrest, questions are starting to take shape: What, for example, differentiates a sculpture from a so-called objet d’art. What takes precedence – the material, with which the sculptor occupies a space, or the space itself, which the artist makes visible and perceptible with his art? The answer lies somewhere in between.

Exhibition runs through to April 1st, 2017

Galerie Christian Lethert
Antwerpener Straße 4
50672 Cologne
Germany

www.christianlethert.com

PATTE LOPER – SPARKLY DARKLY

Formally trained as a painter, Loper is a conceptual artist working between several mediums to mine the histories of 20th century art. In Sparkly Darkly Loper uses iconic imagery from early surrealism and cubism as raw material that she fragments, disrupts, and dissolves into associative forms and shapes. The aesthetic and cultural codes of her sources, which were revolutionary in their own right the tendency to dismantle and reformulate the figure as a reflection of social and cultural disruption are evident and demonstrate the wide-ranging experimentation in the mediums she employs. The resulting multifaceted spatial collage composed of paintings, performance, video and new sculptural work constructed from recycled material as well as from repurposed sculptural objects from previous exhibitions evokes a response by the viewer, whose recognition of the destruction triggers an internal expectation of reconstruction.

Opposite – Still Life with Percival, 2016

Exhibition runs through to April 9th, 2017

Black & White Gallery / Project Space
56 Bogart Street
Brooklyn
New York
NY 11206

www.blackandwhiteartgallery.com

JASMINA CIBIC – FIRM FOUNDATIONS

Cibic’s work seeks to establish dialogues between politically latent objects from diverse historical or linguistic and media spaces. Hers is a practice that addresses the ways in which visual language, art, architecture, and rhetoric are deployed and instrumentalised by political regimes, before investigating what happens to these fragments when the ideologies they endorse collapse.

Gathering together these symbols and iconographies, Cibic’s projects present a synthesis of gesture, stagecraft and re-enactment. Instantiated in films and installations, hers is also an ongoing performative practice, an ‘enacted’ exercise in the dissection of statecraft. Cibic plays a double-game, at once decoding mechanisms of power whilst building her own exemplary allegorical structures. Tracing lines through history, she undertakes detailed research of official state archives and hidden repositories of authority. The conventions, apologues and narratives she turns her forensic gaze upon are drawn from various players involved in the contrivances of power, working in concert to forge common visions of the nation.

Extending from the gallery window to cover almost half of the space’s walls is Cibic’s The Land In Which a Wide Space For National Progress Is Ensured, a performative installation that alludes to the soft power strategies of art and architecture utilized by (trans)national political structures. A wallpaper composed of numerous photographic elements seamlessly stitched together depicts a fictitious monochrome landscape strewn with banners. This picturesque utopia is an amalgam of images taken by Josip Broz Tito’s personal photographers in an attempt to frame the emerging postwar Yugoslavia – artists in the service of the state whose images are necessarily implicated in a political aim despite their circumstantial nature.

Opposite – Firm Foundations, 2017

Exhibition runs through to April 8th, 2017

ZAK | BRANICKA
Lindenstr. 35
D – 10969
Berlin
Germany

www.zak-branicka.com