Stephen Lawrence Gallery
City is Forever, not me
March 6 – April 9 2010
Opening Friday March 5, 5:30-7:30pm.
Florian Balze, Ingo Gerken, Andreas Koch, Inken Reinert, Peter Wächtler, Oliver Zwink
Curated by Oliver Zwink
Stephen Lawrence Gallery, University of Greenwich, Queen Anne Court,
Old Royal Naval College, Park Row, Greenwich, London SE10 9LS.
Twenty years after the fall of the wall, Berlin is still under construction. In their attempt to recreate a homogeneous architectural language, referring to the Berlin of the 1920’s, the city planners failed in most cases to develop and integrate the unknown new potentials of urban space created by war damage and the division of the city during the cold war. However the prospect of a new “Berlin to be“ has attracted “creatives” of all sorts. Therefore, probably unlike any other European metropolis in the last twenty years, urban development and urban life in Berlin has become the centrepoint of artistic production and debate: the Berlin cityscape becoming playground, utopian test site, object of projection and field of research for a whole generation of artists.
The exhibition City is Forever, not me puts together work of six Berlin based artists dealing with the transitory state of a cityscape:
Florian Balze’s sculptures relate to architectural decorations and percent-for-art-scheme projects that were often used to upgrade the monotonous building blocks of the so-called “International style”. In readopting fictitious fragments of these aesthetisizing forms he prevents them from being forgotten, yet simultaneously showing the failure of utopian ideas.
Ingo Gerken is interested in the fragility of power strategies, as made apparent by current efforts to fill the last available empty sites in Berlin with high-risk speculative architecture. Cityworks, a consecutive photo series, shows subversive sculptural gestures, which intervene with the urban environment.
In Andreas Koch’s work, urban topography and architecture become formal characters for his play with scale, relation and the transformation of space. The video projection Adalbertstrasse maps the view into the streetscape of a busy quarter in Berlin-Kreuzberg, completely emptied of cars and people. Based just on one high resolution photograph, starting with a focus on a window, the zoom takes 35 minutes to uncover the full view of the perspective into the street before panning on window from where the film starts again.
Inken Reinert’s works engage with the heritage of socialist modernism. Her pencil drawings of large empty buildings in former East Berlin, now deprived of their function, meticulously unveil the leftover shells of a faded ideology.
Peter Wächtler’s makes use of two public sculptures: Henry Moore’s “Large two forms” in front of the former Federal Chancellery in Bonn, inaugurated in 1979, an iconic symbol of of the “Bonner Republik”; and Eduard Chillida’s “Unity” inaugurated in 1999 in front of the new Chancellery in Berlin, the two works function as point of critical reflection on ideas of the individual and the representative.
Oliver Zwink’s works approach the terrain of the city by creating a process of working, in which randomness and planning, construction and destruction are generating complex and fragile physical shapes. Starting point for his large sized drawing was a frottage on a used, large sized cutting board made with simple A4 sheets, which were successively attached to each other. The complex structure generated from the slices and marks of the board worked as a basic layer out of which a city-topography was generated.
For further information, please contact David Waterworth at slg@gre.ac.uk or tel: 020 8331 8260/9954.
The Stephen Lawrence Gallery
The University of Greenwich established the Stephen Lawrence Gallery in 2000 to promote diversity in the representation of visual cultures through the work of contemporary artists, architects and designers.
Transport links: Cutty Sark DLR, Greenwich and Maze Hill stations.