How do you describe an artist who defines his work as being somewhere “between
impossible to describe and conceptual”, who rejects the category of
the unnatural, and maintains that evolution cannot be held in check?
The individualist Johann Zetterquist is definitely not an aesthetic privateer.
The sketches he is showing at the Künstlerhaus are “proposals
(for public art)”. These are designs for public places, even if the
projects suggested sometimes adopt the character of autonomous, surreal
installations. The lanes of a sketched motorway junction, for example, end
in water, because the conceived traffic construction almost completely covers
a small-scale island: this is overgrown by artistic feeder roads and exits,
a network overrunning the entire surface.
Or is the viewing tower, which - crowned by a parking platform – recommends
itself for the more romantic moments of automobile life, more realistic?
Certainly these designs make a determined attempt to iron out the differences
between the artificial and the natural. Zetterquist sees nature as art and
art - equally clearly – as nature. An insight that is illustrated,
naturally, in Zetterquist’s exhibition. (Opening: 21.8.)
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It is not unusual for
artists to adapt found photographs from the natural world in their
work. But it is something out of the ordinary when this develops
into the pictorial biography of an ape.
Cor Dera did not only do research at Berlin Zoo for his work produced
at the Künstlerhaus. He was also given access to the comprehensive
picture archive owned by Raimon Opitz, the man responsible for the
apes.
Dera follows his own method of creating a balance between the observation
of nature and artistic construction; in his project, he focuses
on one particular natural actress, the female gorilla "Dufte".
Dera is showing a selection of c. 120 pictures which he chose from
Raimon Opitz’ collection after detailed discussion, and then
arranged in his own digital archive. After this, the artist processed
the pictures and used them to produce a series of laser prints in
three different sizes.
(Opening: 21.8.)
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