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Damien & The Love Guru
Installation view
Christiane Blattmann
The Law
Aperitivo at Zollikerstrasse 249 – 251
Saturday 26. March 6-9 pm
Damien & The Love Guru
[removed]
flatmarkus
‘The Law’ will be on view until 30. April 2022
Vampires in the Concrete Factory, 2022, bronze, marble, 36 x 58 x 35 cm special thank you to Fonderia Battaglia and Van Den Weghe for the collaboration
A Chained Chain, 2022, cast silicone on dyed jute, pigment, 60 x 120 cm
Watershed, 2022, cast silicone on dyed jute, pigment, rope, aluminium stretcher, 170 x 115 x 7 cm
Installation view
Under the Spell of Law, 2022, cast silicone on dyed jute, pigment, aluminium stretcher. 90 x 62 x 6 cm
Tree House , 2022, cast silicone on cheese cloth, pigment, aluminium stretcher, 45 x 30 x 5 cm
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How to behave, confronted with assertion of authority expressed through symbolic vagueness? In Christiane Blattmann’s The Law, the works on the wall have been hung low, a feeling of pressure highlighted by the posture of the central figure. The exhibition space, that could well be the reception room of the building, opens up with an atmosphere of slight unease.
In the works presented on the walls, jute and silicon merge to form an amalgamated substance, penetrating each other and blurring respective boundaries. Their materiality is appealing, but the presentation maintains a distance that frustrates a direct sensory input. Like flesh, they trigger the itch to explore them by the touch of fingers, a caress that is the basis of fascination. As exposed flesh, the representation builds up from the inside: the fabric is not the support of the image but a constitutive element of it. Those inner working dynamics set up the works as open situations, sites of negotiation for matters of spatial agency. Materially, how do the bas-reliefs penetrate the room if they are internal discussions? And metaphorically, what space do they occupy, as knitted walls “dressed” on real ones? They oscillate between illusionism and flatness, as much literally as symbolically.
The sphinx-like figure in the room keeps its legibility in tension, performing what may be an act of reverence as much as a rite of an assertion of power. The bird figures that populate one of the wall works share an ambiguous posture, interweaved in their brick backdrops, and similarly call for an act of deciphering: are they guards of a protected treasure, or scavengers waiting to feast? Those creatures act with a troubling dose of defiance; ambivalent social signs. The tales they tell belong to the genre of chimeric chivalry, with commitment and moral codes. The two gates in the exhibition also trigger uncertainty: one in marble, as much support for the body it carries as its excrescence, and the other appearing in the bigger jute work, interlocked with the wall. Situated at symbolic peripheries, the gate doesn’t seem to do what it is supposed to do, but performs another act, probing the limits of what it could be the entry to.
But all those stories should not divert from the fact that you, the viewer, still stand in front of a wall. It has an imposing effect, maintaining you at respectable distance. How will you act? In English as in German, you stand in front of the law, an eye to eye duel that builds expectancy for a judgment to come. You may think of Kafka, but the play on mate- rials in the exhibition as well as the gazing may lead you rather to think of a queue of a trendy night club, waiting for the bouncer’s irrevocable decision to let you go in. If judgment is favourable, destiny is manifest: the night is yours, it always has been.
Paolo Baggi
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CURRENTLY
Raffaela Naldi Rossano
Giuseppe Desiato
Le Nemesiache
curated by Sonia D’Alto
How she spins
9. March – 16. April 2022
Damien & The Love Guru
Brussels
Christiane Blattmann
Sharon Van Overmeiren
Sour Well
group show with Henrik Potter
12. March – 30. April 2022
Nir Altman
Munich
Anne Fellner
Energy Patterns
group show
16. February – 23. April 2022
Galerie Tobias Naehring
Berlin
Julian Irlinger
A Smile With One Tooth
19. February – 9. April 2022
Galerie Thomas Schulte
Berlin
Emanuele Marcuccio
D’Après Cavenago
2017-2021
[removed] / Damien & The Love Guru
Zurich
Jannis Marwitz
La réforme de Pooky
19. February – 8. May 2022
group show with Fabienne Audéoud, Sarah Benslimane, Elise Corpataux, Gritli Faulhaber, Sophie Gogl, Jasmine Gregory, Nanami Hori, Tom Humphreys, Marc Kokopeli, Matthew Langan-Peck, Sophie Reinhold, Marta Riniker-Radich, Christoph de Rohan Chabot, Thomas Sauter, Grégory Sugnaux, SoiL Thornton, Amanda del Valle, Jiajia Zhang
curated by Grégory Sugnaux, Paolo Baggi and Nicolas Brulhart
Kunsthalle Friart Fribourg
Fribourg
Jasmin Werner
Stufen zur Kunst
11. March 2022 – March 2023
Kunstverein Hannover
Hannover
UPCOMING
Anne Fellner
duo show with Alessandro Carano
Depth of Field
Opening Tuesday 29. March 6-9 pm
Castiglioni in collaboration with Damien & The Love Guru
Milano
Emanuele Marcuccio
Der Radwechsel
Opening 30. March 6-9 pm
group show with Jenna Bliss, Noémie Degen/Simon Jaton, Martin Ebner, Georgia Gardner Gray, Julia Haller, Sveta Mordovskaya, Matthias Noggler, Lukas Posch, Allen Ruppersberg, Michael E. Smith, Joanna Woś, Steffen Zillig
curated by Lukas Posch
Universitätsgalerie im Heiligenkreuzerhof
Vienna
Slow Reading Club
KASK Talk
31. March 8pm
KASK
Ghent
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