„We breathe, perceive, connect, create, transgress and act. It is simple. And it is not. This is us.“You might wonder what this merely poetic statement wants to tell you as an exhibition title. Did you ever ask yourself how it feels to be an artist? In a time, where the artistic process strongly needs to transgress society this is a highly relevant question. We need every human and specifically operative decision makers like ceos, investors, politicians and scientists all over the world to think and act like artists: To confront themselves with truth and reality. To be experimental and visionary. To embrace creativity and collaboration and to liberate themselves from old world dogmas. How else can we solve the problems of our time if we stay stuck in the past thinking patterns?
How to overcome overconsumption, climate change and progressive mass distinction of whole species (ours included)?
This exhibition wants to celebrate the importance to be an artist and it wants to invite you to get in touch with your own inner artist. Come visit this show and tell me: What does this mean for you?
The Maison des Temps artist residency, situated in an ancient farm house in the north of France, puts art in touch with nature as we believe this is the most powerful element to inspire true change. The vibrant big cities and digitalization distract us from ourselves. From reality. How can we solve problems if we are not able to see them?
I curated this exhibition following my intuitive sense of which positions would fit ideally to this unique exhibition space in nature. After more than 500 exhibitions in 20 years this was a very new way of curating for me: I deeply looked in myself where I stand in my life right now. I made 12 month of artist research, I put the aesthetical and conceptual dots together, I created a vision for this show, allowed myself to liberate myself from commercial patterns and started curating. Was simple. And it was not. This is us.
Johann Haehling von Lanzenauer
It is certainly a challenge to be a painter today. How can you really become modern with such a traditional language, one frequently accused of being superseded or without having the ability to communicate something? Through his recent work Marco Reichert appears to give us a valid answer: he offers the public the possibility of thinking of a new future for painting, one that does not forget the past and yet is able to capture the potentiality offered by contemporary technology. The works by Marco Reichert are pictorial planes that regain their verticality only at the end of the creative process, and they bring to mind horizontal surfaces destined to host objects and to collect the traces of their passage as well as to record the classical gestures of the “painter”.
Each painting is planned, but it is also unpredictable. This is because it develops during the very course of the work, and each image is intrinsically tied to the elements utilised. The vast range of materials and tools involved leads to new structures, new textures, and new colours which could not have been arrived at without having passed through these pictorial mechanisms.
Besides this, what is of primary importance is the action that the “painting machines”, programmed by the artist himself, exert on the work. Planned at first as “robots” that followed a geometric path and rules in order to interact constantly with them, these devices have today become more complex, and they are for the artist a genuine tool, on the same level as brushes, ones capable of obtaining certain visual results. This is certainly a strange way of painting and it adds something to the final visual effect, one that cannot be separated from the creative imagination of its programmer. –– Maria Villa
Marco Reichert (*1979 in Berlin) studied Fine Art at Weißensee Kunsthochschule Berlin. He lives and works in Berlin.
Lines, groove, scratches and holes show themselves throughout Anneliese Schrenks pictorial world. A sensual play of texture comes into being. Mounted on stretchers – thus adopting the concept of painting – the artist presents skin: leather hides. A former living material that through the tanning process was made durable and exposes its texture and beauty.
Since Marcel Duchamp, the use of non-traditional materials is not a novelty in art. This form of art assigns the artist with a new mission, they become a seeker in a never-ending stock of everyday objects. Leather is such an object. Whether it is the living room furniture or the car upholstery, we are confronted everywhere with this animal material, which once was the skin of a living being. And what does Schrenk do? She searches for this material, takes a flawed leather hide and mounts it on a supporting construction: the stretcher, which was traditionally carrying art or respectively painting.
The hide and its texture determine the size of the piece of art. Inevitably a certain randomness resonates here, because texture and nature can only be determined from the leather hides that are available.
And still: At first glance Schrenks imagery appears to be pure painting. Abstract paintings with fine sections and again vibrant colour shades. This is not surprising, as animal skin and also meat, are constant companions in painting. Especially if we look at meat, it was for example for Rembrandt, Soutine and also Bacon a constant measurement in the conflict of what was considered beauty.
Schrenk leaves out the meat, although the animal scent is still present when she translates skin, once covering raw flesh, into a piece of art. In her later works she gives back a body to the hides. She washes the leather, dries it and moulds it into a hardened shape.
If lying on the ground or hanging on the wall the pieces of leather reach out, become organic or remind us of a dropped roll of fabric and some with delicate ends reach out into the space. Like folds of garments from baroque figures they seemingly swing to new heights and yet, can black leather withstand the comparison with these sacred ornaments? Yes. Because the tranquility that Schrenks work radiates, refers to this spiritual transcendence. An exciting opposition is happening, between vulnerability, black leather, lightness and also beauty, which gives her work a special depth leaving some paths open for the future.
When reading about Anneliese Schrenk often the term brutality comes up… The skin and its vulnerability show markings of the past. This kind of injury is also not new, just think about Lucio Fontana and his canvases with cuts.
Also Anneliese Schrenk for some of her works processes the leather causing further injuries by using fire, shoe polish and also acid. Thus she examines the leather and its behaviour and she accentuates – or „paints“ – on the canvas. The arising texture is thereby incorporated in her works on paper. Using the technique of frottage, which through Max Ernst was accepted into the canon of art terms, Schrenk traces different materials and textures. If pebbles or pavement, the graphite pencil by tracing the unevenness and as a result are giving the leather “painting“ a depth effect and a texture, that again form a link with one of the many definitions of abstract art.
Schrenk’s art takes on typical forms in art in order to partly negate them with non-traditional art material. The material being the main protagonist in her works, the artist can often only intervene in a peripheral way in terms of a predetermined principle of contingency. Partly the material can be moulded and again it cannot be. This creates tension: vulnerability against beauty, purity against the originality of the material – namely the leather hide.
Schrenk (*1974 in Weiz, Austria) holds a degree from the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna as an alumna of Gunter Damisch and Veronika Dirnhofer. She lives and works in Vienna.
Friederike Reveman‘s works are showing tapestry like patterns or systems that are populated by small figures. In each painting Reveman set‘s up an environment which is fragmented in it’s painterly structures.
And by the use of various mediums, such as wax, sand, marble dust or paper collage the viewer is captured by an almost palbable color experience.The recurring characters of each work seem to live their live throughout her paintings, continuously changing. For example, there’s a mother’s transformation from a young woman holding her child in a scene to an aging one in another scene.
Reveman‘s paintings try to convey stories of our very present which she alters symbolically from her own experiences to today’s social challenges, composing her own fables.
Artist statement: Humberto Poblete
Bustamante is a Chilean Painter who lives in Paris,
he only paints when feels like it.
Jonathan Todyrk started as a young, fervent, creative, but found himself having to rediscover his art medium, identity, and purpose after beginning a family. When he found the perfect canvas, everything changed.
After falling in love with art in highschool, Jonathan turned to music as a creative practice. For ten years, he played with a worship band in churches, camps, and several cities including Montreal, where he met his wife. After getting married, they moved to Illinois to raise a family. His music career morphed into an “ordinary” job, and creativity faded from his daily routines. This ushered Jonathan into asking a critical question: “What is my purpose?”, “I found myself really, really miserable,” he said. “I went through a long season of searching, praying, and wondering what my purpose is in life. I was struggling with depression. ”When his father gave him an old set of his paints, Jonathan felt that a creative hobby might help with his well being. Day after day, he came home from work, put his two kids to bed, and painted in his garage. Painting became his escape it spurred his creative spirit into life. Soon, the hobby began to feel more like a calling. “I really started to see during that time that this is who God created me to be”, he said. “It’s been a coming to terms with who I am.
I believe my work comes from an overflow of my intimacy with God. ”As Jonathan’s developed as an artist, he’s explored new materials and ideas of motion, expression, and depth. Stumbling upon acrylic based concrete, he struck gold. “It came from a desire to create more texture and depth in my work,” he said. “I wanted it to come off the canvas and really blur the lines between sculpture and in painting. I love the use of bright color, but I didn’t want to use it against a white background. When I found this material, it worked. It made sense for me. This is one thing I found on this journey that I can hold onto.”
Rachel Garrard
Throughout the course of my career, I have combined scientific research with esoteric practices in order to develop a symbolic language that intimately connects the inner personal worlds with the cosmic and universal. I have done this through a multidisciplinary practice across performance, painting, drawing, sculpture, video, installation and holographic projection.
My paintings, composed from natural substances such as quartz and rock powder pigment that I have collected through field research trips, hand ground, and applied to raw linen through a labor intensive process of fine layering, show a language of geometric and symbolic forms that are both personal imaginaries as well as loose interpretations of propositions in quantum physics, such as Mtheory and supersymmetry. Mtheory is a unifying concept for the many string theories that explain the composition of all matter in the universe, which, at the smallest level, appear as a series of strings vibrating at an infinitesimally minute scale.
Everything that is material breaks down into the quantum level as particles, atoms, quarks, strings, and vibrations what we might believe to be solid and fixed are intangible. Assimilating these theories with my own experiences in non physical space that I access through meditation informs the painting compositions, the works tap into personal spiritual knowledge, intuition and scientific research to express metaphysical theories whose principles resonate with the cosmological, all while fore fronting nature as a power source for further inquiry.
Born in 1984 in Devon, England, and currently live in New York and Mexico. graduate studies at Central Saint Martins in 2009 awarded artist residencies at the Atacam a Telescope Farm in Chile in 2011, the Center for the Holographic Arts at Ohio State University in 2012 and the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, CT, Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, NY and Millay Colony, NY in 2018. exhibited Pioneer Works, Eyebeam Art and Technology Center, the National Academy Museum, the Hammond Museum, Marc Straus Gallery, Jack Hanley Gallery, Sun daram Tagore Gallery and Tanja Grunert Gallery, and at Shoshona Wayne Gallery in Los Angeles. exhibited internationally at the Lille Métropole Musée d’Art Moderne, France, Museo Universitario del Chopo, Mexico City, Yota Space Digital Arts Festival, St Petersburg, AmbikaP3, London, Shizaru Gallery, London and Kraftwerk Rummelsburg, Berlin.
Zebra Kadebra
Emma Larsson was born in Gothenburg, Sweden in 1977. Since her teenage years, Emma has had herown art studio. Even though shestudied art, she did not do higher art education as she started to have a large family. She considers herselfself-taught. Now that her children are getting older, her full- time commitment is to her Art. Also renowned on Instagram as @zebrakadebra, she has an impressive following of over 110K followers from all over the world.
Larsson’s watercolors, paintings, collages and sculptures Are in constant flow. She describes her creative process as the synergy between the artist, the material and an unknown presence, that she calls “force”. She is not analytic. Emma’s paintings are purely intuitive, they source from pleasure and freedom.
She starts with a blank paper and follow the flow. In her spare time, she walks in the virgin forests surrounding the city she lives in, Stockholm. She finds most of her inspiration in nature’s shapes, colors and patterns, leading to abstract and moving forms in her paintings. Emma Larsson has been exhibited in Sweden, Denmark, UK, and now the USA. She has done numerous collaborations in different mediums with high profiled brands such as H&M/COS, SOHO House London, Rahel Comey, Artpieces, ShowStudio (Nick Night and Bex Cassie), Martimore House London, Anamika Khanna and more.
Larsson and her artworks have also been featured in Harper’s Bazaar Magazine,WeTransfer/WePresent,Woman’s Health Magazine USA, REVS Magazine, Chor Dat a Magazine USA and more. Blue Snake Root Artist Statement “I’m a tireless explorer. If I become too comfortable and feel I know too much of a subject, I get bored. What I am constantly seeking for needs to be unknown to me. Creating my art is about playing and exploring freely. If I am asked to describe my work, I can only come up with words such as: liquid, energy, shapes, rhythms, playful, nature’s, wonders, curiosity, contemplation, poetry, freedom, meaning, longing, intuition.
EXHIBITION AT LA MAISON DES TEMPS
ARTIST RESIDENCY AT ALSACE, FRANCE
Exhibition from july 10th to august 29th, 2021
Open Saturdays and Sundays from 2-7pm and by appointment:
Johann Haehling von Lanzenauer
johann@maisondestemps.net
La Maison des Temps
Kauffenheim, France
Exact address by inquiry. Please write us if you want to visit.
We are very happy to welcome you and give you a tour through the exhibition* if wanted.
