Pawel Polus: Eclipse

01 June –27 July 2013
Opening: Friday, 31 May, 2013, 7-10 pm

Eclipse. The very term alludes to something hidden, creating a sense of mystery.

And indeed, in his third solo exhibition in Emerson Gallery Berlin, the young Polish artist, Pawel Polus elicits a sense of mystery, with an exhibition giving rise to more questions than answers.

The idea of an eclipse refers to what is hidden or lost behind the act of painting. On another level, the artist refers literally to the walls covered by his various large scale paintings and the exhibition is intended more as an installation or an art environment pulling the viewer away from the walls where the paintings are presented to a greater awareness of the gallery space in its entirety.  The paintings are not pictures to be read but objects to be experienced in and of themselves.

Once again the young artist is obsessed with his predecessors, in this case especially Ad Reinhardt, whom Polus considers to be the last modernist painter, the last to paint for painting’s sake. With subdued  understatement Polus  challenges  the viewer to question the meaning of painting while simultaneously denying any such meaning. The demands placed on the viewer  are intimidating and  the viewing experience is certainly not everyman’s pleasure. The consequences, however, are suprising: With the call for painting for painting’s sake, the artist draws attention to the potential intrinsic value of art, which is itself a political statement. 

Pawel Polus strives for an aesthetic experience that denies that legitimacy of the functionalization and rationalization that form the basis of today’s consumerist society.  More simply stated, by refusing to actively work within the system as a consumer, the art viewer’s enjoyment of art for art’s sake reveals itself as a surprisingly subversive statement.

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Berlin's landmark Hotel Bogota is in danger of being closed!

For three generations the hotel has been an active part of the Berlin cultural landscape and Germany's capital would be a less interesting place without the Bogota.

Show your support of this Berlin tradition, with a signature on the Hotel's petition:

https://www.openpetition.de/petition/kommentare/das-hotel-bogota-soll-leben

For further updates check out:

www.bogota.de

As a prequel to our Eighth Summer Fest of International Art (Berlin Meets the UK) it was our great pleasure to welcome the artist group Something Human to EGB.

On Friday 07 June 2013

3:30 - 4:30 pm

 the group from London  presented

 their travelling exhibition trunk

Move With (Out)

with us right across from Berlin's River Spree.

The project may be ascribed to a long tradition of portable galleries from Marcel Duchamp's  “Boite-en-valise” to Robert Filliou's "La Galerie Légitime". We were happy to host Move With (Out) at EGB and to continue this exciting tradition.

Travelling from London to Berlin, the nomadic project MOVE WITH (OUT) stopped over at Emerson Gallery Berlin on Friday 7th June 2013. 

W I T H (OUT) is a multidisciplinary projected initiated and curated by Something Human. Its first enquiry in 2012 was manifested in an exhibition set within the residential space of converted Victorian flat, and brought together an interdisciplinary selection of artworks such as mixed media, photography, installation film, performance, talks and workshops, which questioned the notions of  "home".

Artists: John Clang, Yingmei Duan, Nina Feldman, Valerie Grove, Howard Hardiman, Gloria Houng, Lucia Lopez, Penzo + Fiore, Helen Omand, The Light Surgeons, Clemens Von Wedemeyer. 

SOMETHING HUMAN

 Something Human is a curator-collective interested in exploring movement and relationships across boundaries, through our shared multidisciplinary interests in architecture, design, sculpture, mixed media, photography, moving image and performance.

Check out the EGB event at the grouop's blog:

 https://movewithout.wordpress.com

Next stop ... Italy

Music - particularly experrimental music - continues to play an important role in the program at EGB ...

The avant-garde Polish artist and musician, Grzegorz Pleszynski, has just released his new CD Antidepressant Music in the Car. The compositions on the CD are a mixture of jazz, new music and sound installations, most often with Pleszynski's catchy hooks on bass guitar.

The second last track, "I Don't Want to Be Abel. I Don't Want to be Cain" features voices recorded live at EGB. Among our artists heard on the CD are Jaroslaw Kozlowski, Ann Noel and Ben Patterson.

The CD is available at EGB for just 10 €.

For more information regarding Pleszynski's up-cominmg performance at EGB, stay tuned at this site.

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We are extremely happy to announce that in March two of EGB young artists tied the knot in Japan:
Mikołaj Polinski and Misa Shimomura are now man and wife.

We congratulate and wish them all the best in their new life together.

For a review of Mikołaj and Misa's outstanding 2011/12 exhibit  check out the link to:

 "Noises of Utopia"

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The approach of our Eighth Annual Summer Fest of Internationakl Art (Berlin trifft das UK) is a good opportunity to review the high points of last yea's fest with Italy.

In this regard we are happy to announce the availability of a full length video of Jernnifer Rosa's Performance, A Different You:

https://vimeo.com/channels/jenniferrosa

The performance was a highlight of our Seventh Summer Fest of International Art in 2012 and with nine performers coming to us from Northern Italy, it is a good example of the extraordinary quality of our annual summer fest in general.

The video is well worth a closer look in this memorable presentation.

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