27.04. - 06.06.2023
S O I L
Christine Jackob-Marks
Opening reception
Thursday, 27.04. 17:00-21:00 with official introduction at 19:00
The English word soil summarizes themes that characterize the entire creative path of Christine Jackob-Marks: the ground, the earth (world, planet), the cause; to soil: to pollute, contaminate, sully. The exhibition focuses on one of the painter's guiding genres, the landscape in transition from the 1980s to the current series of works. In particular, the assaulted, threatened landscape, where something is at stake, is representative of her exploration of the threats to the natural world that is our home and condition of life. In doing so, the artist demonstrates sensitivity to a special, contradictory beauty of nature, which unfolds incomparably fascinating, bizarre and imaginative color games not despite but precisely in processes of withering and decay. After all, isn't it the abysmal and the ugly that the actual igniting power for change and innovation lies in, while pure beauty only knows complacency?
If one compares Christine Jackob-Marks' works of recent years with earlier works on nudes, landscapes, still lifes, and animal portraits, one can describe a turning away from representational depiction. Significantly, the painter does not understand this in any way as a turn to abstraction. Quite the contrary: anyone following her artistic development will find, especially in the landscape-related paintings, a progressive intensification of essential thoughts that accompany the entire oeuvre. The driving questions such as "where do I come from?", "why am I in the world?", "what is the unity of the cosmos?" testify to an incessant search for the essence of being and refuse any simple solution. If Dr. Peter Raue saw in Jackob-Marks' paintings the "loss of the innocence of the landscape", today in them the guilt and innocence of color, form and ductus as well as of the painting process itself seem to be put up for negotiation. This would be the logical culmination of the credo described by the artist: "destroy what is seen because it is not really what is seen; there is another reality behind it."
A look at Jackob-Marks' path since her exhibition debut in Berlin in 1984 makes one aware that her artistic "keynote" has always remained the same through all variations of motifs and execution. Just as in Faust the search for what holds the world together at its core seems inseparable from the seduction of evil, so she repeatedly reaches out to doubt and the unfamiliar to advance her artistic work. "I am the painting," she says, leaving us to wonder if her artistic path itself is the answer.
10.06. - 20.07.2023
Michael Dressel
9 HOURS APART. Photography from Berlin and Los Angeles
Opening reception
Saturday, 10.06. 17:00-21:00 | 19:00 introduction by Dr. Enno Kaufhold
The Life of Michael Dressel tells an extraordinary German-American artist's biography. Born in East Berlin in 1958, after a failed escape attempt and two years in the GDR penitentiary, he experiences a few short but intense years in the wild pre-wall fall West Berlin. Even before the fall of the Wall, he finds himself on the West Coast of the USA and makes Los Angeles his new home. There he works for years as a sound editor for numerous Hollywood films, some of which have won Oscars and Golden Reels for sound, including the last sixteen Clint Eastwood films, resulting in his appointment to the Oscar Academy. Throughout this time, he regularly commutes between the two metropolises - at home in both cities and equally familiar and foreign.
Reflection on daily experience in the world of stars and Hollywood studios and awareness of their ultimate inadequacy played a special role in his photographic work from the beginning. How many people are there who came to Hollywood full of dreams and hopes and who now eke out an existence in the shadow of the "dream factories"? "On Hollywood Boulevard, the so-called "Walk of Fame", a never-ending spectacle full of tragic, comic, absurd and sometimes dangerous situations takes place. In this environment I find human scenarios that are often timeless and point beyond the concrete place." (MD) That Michael Dressel's work is often classified under the rubric of social documentary only incompletely captures his concern. Without question, social commentary cannot be separated from photographs of people, many of whom have been marginalized by poverty, illness, drugs, or strokes of fate. For Dressel, however, this is only the superficial first layer of his pictures.
What makes a picture a good picture, he says, is the visualization of a more fundamental level that is effective and valid regardless of the place and time of the photograph, regardless of the class, race, origin, or age of those portrayed. The exhibition pursues this idea and shows photographs from Berlin for the first time alongside the photographs from Hollywood and Los Angeles. The 9-hour time difference between the two cities represents more than just different time zones: "When I come to Germany, I often feel like I'm coming from a social future..."