New Sentimentality

What is ‘New Sentimentality’? What does it mean, and specifically, what is the art that flows from it? In short, it is about the transforming of two extremes which converge critically in a work of art. These extremes are: the representation of a physical void, versus the desire to affect  and communicate with the viewer. It concerns the paradox of a cognitive image on the one hand and the ability to arouse powerful emotions on the other. And the question of whether and how they can coincide. Because if there is no manifest representation, how is it then possible to affect people through art? And is that desirable anyway? Within Russian culture in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s artists demonstrated a great deal of interest in the concept of ‘sentimental aesthetics’. The New Sentimentality is a literary concept that sprung from this and it is occupied with the various polarities within aesthetics. The Russian Sergei Gandlevsky, a leading poet, also describes this trend as “‘a critical sentimentalism’: holding the middle ground between two extremes, namely a lofty and detached Metarealism that ignores contemporary life, and Conceptualism, which is deliberately reductionist, ridiculing all stilted ideals and models of discourse". (Epstein, Mikhael. Russian Postmodernism: New Perspectives on Late Soviet and Post-Soviet Culture. New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1999, pp 456-468)

An important backdrop to the exhibition is the relationship between the paradigm shifts of the 1990s and those of the start of the 21st century. Using the conceptual trends in art from the sixties and seventies, artists in the ‘90s developed immaterial structures and processes. Making an identifiable art object was often of lesser importance than the redefining of the concept of art as such . Interdisciplinaryism, collaboration and an emphasis on process were the most notable characteristics. In the first decade of the 21st century, the emphasis has shifted once more to the work itself. Artists utilise the freedoms acquired in the ‘90s to once again make physical works, the difference being that these can now be deployed in various contexts. A striking point is the sophisticated way in which these artists are able to traverse various social and institutional spheres. In this exhibition, Whatspace is seeking to engage the viewer in a dialogue and a confrontation on the subject of the above themes.

The New Sentimentality intends to be an investigation into the relationship between good art and a deliberately flexible approach to process. It asks itself the question of how powerful emotions affecting the viewer can be reconciled with a physically empty image and how such individually strong works can achieve a place in a greater whole without relinquishing their own identity.

‘It would appear that Conceptualism should exclude the serious usage of words such as “soul”, “tear”, “angel”, “beauty”, “truth” and “the Kingdom of Heaven” (words used by the most popular poet of the 1990s, the Conceptualist Timur Kibirov) in their primary meaning. But here, at the very peak of Conceptualism and, as it were, at the exit from it, suddenly these same words are being written again, some even with capital letters, … (Epstein 1999: 458)   

ARTISTS:

Thomas Zipp

Characterising for the work of Thomas Zipp (1966 Heppenheim, Germany) are the unwilling appropriation of styles and ideas from the past. The romantic of the history is commemorated and is used in a very experimental and current manner. In its installations, paintings, drawings, sculptures and objects are brought together to a complex teamwork where present, past and future in a strange visionary manner and linked with each other.

Joep van Liefland

Since 2002, Berlin-based Dutch artist Joep van Liefland (1966 Utrecht, The Netherlands) has installed more or less ephemeral franchises of his Video Palace in places ranging from parking lots to art galleries. Although no two incarnations are identical, they always include shelves of old VHS cases for films from a variety of exploitation genres, as well as monitors or projections that show either montage of appropriated footage or an "original" Video Palace production, usually some sort of quasi-porn starring van Liefland. Each Video Palace is accompanied by posters and slogans that tirelessly proclaim the stunning quality of Video Palace products, its friendly service, its astonishingly low prices. Like the design of these ads, the architecture of Video Palace installations is always shoddy to the highest degree.

Tobias Buche

Tobias Buche's (1979 Berlin, Gemany) installations gather a wide range of documents from a variety a sources: mass media, pop culture, the internet and art imagery. These documents are associated with images he takes himself, including pictures from his everyday life depicting his friends and relatives. The combination functions both as a personal and a collective memory. Taking the forms of photographs, photocopies or computer print-outs, the images are displayed on large panels, creating complex compositions within the exhibition space. A complex and non-linear narrative emerges from the combination of these images.

Buche often refers to the Mnemosyne Atlas created by the German art historian Aby Warburg in the 1920s which uses images and documents from different historical and geographical contexts with the aim of developing an art history without text: 'He tried to write a kind of cultural history without writing by constructing it through images. And that's the same with me: I'm trying to tell as complex as possible a story without language.'

André Butzer

Andre Butzer’s (1973 Stuttgart, Germany) work explores the romanticism of painting from a contemporary stand point. Inspired equally from popular culture and art history’s greats from Ensor to De Kooning and Guston. Butzer’s wildly rendered canvases exude a frenetic creative energy redolent of the artistic myths of passion, power, and ‘genius’. Executed on monumental scale, Butzer’s paintings are a triumph of style over substance as his highly articulate techniques and compositions regurgitate graffiti scribbles and cartoon forms.

Ulrich Wulff

In his multi-coloured pictures, the painter Ulrich Wulff (1975 Kempten, Germany), born in the beautiful Allgäu and nowadays painting in Berlin, searches for up-to-date as well as future possibilities for painting as a provision for human life and togetherness. Every day he is commuting from his flat in Naunynstraße to his studio at the Kottbusser Tor in Berlin-Kreuzberg. There he is not only paying a little rent, but also catches every possibility of picture composition and surface design that comes to his mind, transforming them into something beautiful that people reward and understand.

 

Andreas Hofer

Andreas Hofer (1963 Munich, Germany) creates independent, highly complex visual worlds: hybrids of figures, signs, landscapes and scripts of varied and apparently unconnected origins which he describes as being “completely clean of art“. His knowing defiance of the didactic in his appropriation of imagery sees comic superheroes and archvillains, generic political figures and symbols and icons of film and literary history – never from the artworld – coexisiting in realms that are difficult to place and read, and remarkably free of nostalgia. This sense of timelessness, both in terms of date and genre, is further complicated by Hofer’s tendency to sign individual works ‘Andy Hope 1930’. His alter ego remains fixed in a year of shortlived optimism and enormous social upheaval, leading to the dominance of ominous forces in Europe, notably National Socialism in his native Germany.

Wolfgang Flad

With a combination of shapes fashioned from raw wood and papier-maché standing on immaculately lacquered, gleaming socles, the sculptures of Wolfgang Flad (1974 Reutlingen, Germany) are instantly compelling. The shapes comprise amorphous, illogical lines intended to represent living organisms. The artist places the finished pieces on crystal-shaped, perfectly varnished plinths. Even from a distance, the sculptures have a hyper-reality, reminiscent of oddly shaped human body parts. It is with an uneasy glance that we recognise ourselves in these peculiar creations to which Flad assigns the unknown names of stars (Hamal, Regulus or Castor).

Flad’s work is realised against the background of the scientific and artistic Utopias of twentieth-century Modernism. There are echoes of Arp and Brancusi. And of sculptures from nineteen-fifties and sixties sci-fi movies or even sculptures that appeared in cartoons about modern art published in newspapers and magazines from that era. The works are the execution of the idea of a modern time in which science and hippy esotericism converge.

Koen Delaere

My work from the past four years has been centered around the ideas of freedom and the restriction of it. By setting clear rules for myself beforehand, I fight for my own freedom as I work. For this I use a system of constants and variables. A constant might be the canvas's structure of stretchers, the variable the way in which I smear paint on the canvas as I make use of this structure. By working against all sorts of limitations in this method, I hope to create parallels with 1) 'grassroots' and 2) 'do-it-yourself' movements; but at the same time I investigate my own outlook on the world. By increasing the painting's 'readability'—that is to say, its transparency with respect to the approach and technique (or anything on the canvas that contributes to the making of the painting, such as the mixing of paint, etc.—I hope to give the viewer a sense of self-realization, a feeling that the world can be shaped.

On one hand I work within a rather systematic and analytical approach of formal and conceptual painting. And on the other, I use the more whimsical anti-design of the underground culture, the over-aesthetic aspects of graffiti and street art, intensely expressionist 'malerei' and the aesthetics of the counterculture publications.
See notes for 1) and 2).

Notes:
(1) Grassroots is an English term for political processes that develop locally. This often means that local citizens give rise to initiatives and take decisions. The Grassroots idea also refers to community activism.
(2) Do-it-yourself, often referred to by the acronym DIY, is a term used by various communities that focus on people creating or repairing things for themselves without the aid of paid professionals. The notion is related in philosophy to the Arts and Crafts movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Many modern DIY subcultures take the traditional Arts and Crafts movement's rebellion against the perceived lack of soul of industrial aesthetics a step further. DIY subculture explicitly critiques modern consumer culture, which emphasizes that the solution to our needs is to purchase things, and instead encourage people to take technologies into their own hands to solve needs.

The phrase 'do-it-yourself' came into common usage in the 1950s in reference to various jobs that people could do in and around their houses without the help of professionals. A very active community of people continues to use the term DIY to refer to fabricating or repairing things for home needs, on one's own rather than purchasing them or paying for professional repair. In other words, home improvement done by the householder without the aid of paid professionals.
In recent years, the term DIY has taken on a broader meaning that covers a wide range of skill sets. Today, for example, DIY is associated with the international alternative and hardcore music scenes. Members of these subcultures strive to blur the lines between creator and consumer by constructing a social network that ties users and makers close together. There are various communities of media-makers that consider themselves DIY, for example the indymedia network, pirate radio stations, and the zine community.

Thomas Winkler

Thomas Winkler (1972, Germany) is a painter, musician, poet, copywriter and co-director of publishing company Verlag Heckler und Koch. He lives and works in Berlin. Winkler paints grey paintings with 6 colour blocks. The colours and grounds are different in each painting, but the basic principle is the same.

Michael S. Riedel

Berlin-based artist Michael S. Riedel (1972 Frankfurt, Germany) has been confusing audiences for years now, drawing them into a world of echoes, afterimages, and replicas in which nothing is simple or straightforward. Using strategies of doubling and inversion, reversal and distortion, Riedel creates a kind of parallel universe of "filmed films" and "clubbed clubs"--simulacra that are never merely mechanical copies but rather creative restagings, displaced facsimiles of architectural structures, or any number of other miming recontextualizations of artworks and cultural situations.

Hank Schmidt in der Beek

Hank Schmidt in der Beek (1978 Munich, Germany) presented a series of large-scale paintings produced using a system of automated painting. To execute the paintings, in der Beek projected a movie or television show onto a blank canvas and captured as much as possible with his paintbrush as the projection ran. The resulting abstract paintings were exhibited along with films made to document the process. In der Beek also used this method to present “re-colorations” of black-and-white movies. These films (classics from the silent-movie period, as well as color-movies that he himself transformed into black-and-white movies by simply switching the colours out of them) were colorized and afterwards projected onto the same (now painted) canvas, so that the film – with some liberal imagination – could be seen in it's colorized version. The final exhibition showed the colorations which could be regarded as autonomous abstract pictures, or as tools to see a certain movie in it's colorized version, strictly bonded to that movie.

Bas van den Hurk

Bas van den Hurk makes paintings and collages. He achieves his unique style by manipulating the most contemporary approaches to painting: a monochrome palette, the use of ephemera and found objects, abstract mark making, and collage techniques. At times Van den Hurk repeatedly layers the paint at others he scrapes it to form fine veils across fabric, linen and paper.

He operates within the rarefied area of artistic practice inhabited by contemporary painting reaching the end of its logical conclusion; where images can no longer support any meaning. He raises questions such as: - what is a representation? – what is left of it? – what is left to work with? The theme of the work is the mistrust around representation, and the work explores the statement that representations are never innocent.

The tone of these works varies from serious, ugly and morbid to absurdist, witty and light-hearted. The works are often exhibited in combinations, for the express purpose of questioning the meaning of painting itself and the role played in this by the solitary painting. It is a delicate balance.

In his work, Van den Hurk shows the representation as representation, not by showing the ‘what’ of the representation but by showing representation itself. He folds the light of the representation back on itself. This creates a gap in the experience of the viewer, a caesura. An open moment in which the observer stands with empty hands and is thrown back upon himself, creating space for reflection and consideration.

Bara

Recently, Bara (1968, Germany) has transferred his sculptural installations into painting. He is showing two series of works of this retranslation onto the pictorial surface. These large-sized compositions of grey faces in a coarse black grid almost come across as sketches of his well-known shelves of amorphous concrete heads. And yet, a new, apparently explicative moment has been added: scarlet red arrows, each of which are indicating in both directions, are proposing some alleged interpretation.

In addition, coloured heads on a brilliant white ground stand in relation to clearly contoured elements of pure colourfulness. Lines, crossing vertically and horizontally, open themselves to resting spaces, in which the heterogeneous colour-figures, applied partially with brush and partially with sponge, can risk their own weight. In Bara’s newest works, the spontaneous “gesture” of the monochromal pictures of the last years shows itself as concentrated in silent abstraction.

This spectrum of works is completed and widened by two sculptures: at mid-level, samples of concrete heads, which unsettle because of their extraneousness, grin from high towering shelves; reflected on sharp white contours, each of them flash over onto its dark, shadowy and bulky duplicate.

Dennis Loesch

For years, Loesch (1979, Germany) has focused on artistic processes of repetition, overwriting and translating. In different media he has duplicated texts, environments, persons, events, objects and stories, always playing with the space in-between the original and its version.

Remco Torenbosch

Björn Dahlem

Berlin-based conceptualist Bjorn Dahlem (1974 Munich, Germany) made his New York solo debut with "Coma Sculptor," a room-size installation and five smaller sculptures that are a continuation of the young artist's fascination with cosmology. In the open-ended and experimental traditions of artists such as Duchamp and Beuys, Dahlem makes adept use of materials and linguistic puns. The "coma" in the exhibition's title has a double meaning that plays on both the common Greek root (as being in a comatose state or deep sleep) and the less common usage of the word "coma" (the nebulous cloud that forms the head of a comet), a term that comes from astronomy.

Dahlem's intelligently conceived science-fiction universe has a whimsical charm that is both playful and smart. The installation Coma Sculptor contained an oversized, architectonic construction suspended from the ceiling. Fashioned of scrap plywood, duct tape and metal screws, with wires lining its skeletonlike veins, the idiosyncratic sculpture's oblong orbital paths extended out into the gallery, forcing viewers to carefully navigate the space. An eclectic assortment of lit and unlit lightbulbs and fluorescent tubes dotted its edges.

Forming the nucleus of Coma Sculptor was a silver pyramidal frame; jutting up from the ground into the middle of the pyramid was a metal stand on which rested a Plexiglas armature holding aloft a water-filled jar. Suspended in the jar was a small sausage that, according to the artist, symbolized the kid that gets picked on in school. Even without this explicit reference, the tiny frankfurter strikingly alluded to the pathetic fragility of human life dwarfed by the cosmos swirling around it.