OUT OF CONTEXT
BEERS London presents painter Regina Nieke, sculptor Frauke Wilken, and multidisciplinary artist Heike Jobst in Out of Context, an exhibition that presents three female German artists whose work addresses the body as a site of repression/expression and metonym for fantastical and historical reference.
Each of the German-born, raised, and based artists (Nieke hails from Berlin, Wilken from Cologne, and Jobst from Munich) present the body as a porous site of interpretation, but also operate artistic practices that might peripherally comment on whether there fails to exist a canon of work from Germany that historically incorporates the female artist? And if so, what this means for the contemporary, female German artist working within this context – geographically, politically, and artistically. While the exhibition is influenced by these potential oversights in the history of German art, it is equally propelled by recent developments within a contemporary art scene in Germany that attempts to include these artistic perspectives.
It is a bold – but not hyperbolic – statement to claim that the history of German art has largely excluded the female voice. Since the early 20th century, the European canon began including key – albeit marginalized – female artists. For interest, this exhibition chooses to focus on a select and microcosmic sampling (as opposed to the impossible task of attempting a survey-show) on exclusively female, exclusively German artists. A brief glance at artistic heritage in Germany proves a noted lack of recognized artists, and in fact, this setback in female-visibility can be seen as even more pronounced in Germany’s history compared to its European counterparts, perhaps in part due a socio-political unrest during and post Nazi-Germany and the greater factions of repression that were operating on a larger socio-political context.
In a recent article (September 17, 2012) in The Guardian, German academic, author, and philosopher Bernard Schlink controversially explains that the contemporary German’s reaction to the globalization of both history and contemporary existence is “symptomatic of another desire: to escape what it means to be German, including the solidarity, responsibility and guilt attached to that” [3]. One is led to question exactly how a contemporary German artist (female or not) responds to such bold claims? How have the effects of increased mobility on mental states, patriotism and partisanship (or lack thereof) become transitory and manifest in the plastic arts in other geographical locales? With this in mind, the artists selected for Out of Context were chosen for what we might consider visualizations of destabilized meaning: artworks characterized by conditions of precariousness, loss of identity, an address of restriction, fantasy, or a desire to escape… In contemporary Germany, it appears that worldwide concerns of globalization are compounded by a complicated history of “old certainties—historical, ideological, and material [concerns]” including but not exclusively affected by the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
Precarious Worlds: Contemporary Art From Germany, a recent exhibition at the Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis, suggests that this historical repression “unleashed decades of political and social transformations” and can – in the plastic arts – be illustrated in the use of ephemeral materials, wherein a sense of history and memory as fluid and instable is absent [1]. In Out of Context, the entire representation of “real things” is displaced, absent, even unimportant. One might consider the works of Heike Jobst, for instance: installations and displays based upon the artist’s drawings, which subvert and monumentalize ‘the domestic’. While familiar and definitively unheimlich [2], to use the Freudian term – blur and omit the important details in their environment or operate beyond recognition, thus producing transitory, fluid sensory experience within the gallery space, not unlike the recollection of (real or imagined?) memories also referred to in Freud’s primal scene. By staging showcases of a pictorial space, Jobst creates a window into reality: vignettes intended to alter our perception and question reality, history, the dream versus the factual or other polarities like presence and absence, fullness and emptiness, visibility and invisibility, front and back, artifice and authenticity, integrity and fetish.
To further the concept of fantastical space, Regina Nieke’s paintings present what appears to be a radical yet empathetic take on metamorphosing beings frozen within the ‘confines’ of the painted surface. In this instance, portraits of amorphous human-like shapes are reduced to grotesque masses, yet handled simplistic grace and technical mastery, simultaneous beauty and horror. But Nieke is quite aware of a greater historical – and painterly – context within which she hails; her works and titles candidly reference her German influences, such as Caspar David Friedrich (A Monk At the Sea, 1810, see image below), and various works of Arnold Böcklin, to name a few. Her other references are bold and marked, here one sees nods to Bacon, Guston, even Degas and most recently: Doig. Through Neike’s processes, content and technique become unified, and these entities and shadows in paint explode in ecstasy across the painted surface. Her subjects appear without place or space, failing to maintain identity and operating on the periphery of their own reality. In this regard, precision is unimportant in favor of the intensity of emotion and the response culled from the viewer.
Similarly, Frauke Wilken’s minimalist textile soft-sculptures seem a direct compliment to those figures lurking within Nieke’s paintings. Their suspended, dreamlike presence plays with any sense of confrontation, action, tactility, memory, a suggestion of (in)animation. The works seem to verge toward (art-historical ideas of ‘the feminist’) with elements of restraint and repression in place of masculine playfulness: recalling works in chocolate by Janine Antonioni or the haunting cloth-like elements in sculptures by Kiki Smith, versus the ‘silly’ soft sculptures of minimalists Robert Morris or Claes Oldenburg.
It is imperative to maintain while viewing these works that this exhibition does not attempt to answer any of these weighty questions, or provide a historically accurate survey; rather, it attempts to observe and consider large questions in lieu of the works of three talented artists who live, work, and operate as part of a larger historical and contemporary context that creates further complexities for the understanding of these works. Perhaps it is each of the artist’s desire to suggest a new discursive space, a new reality within the abstract understanding of the object and the matter, instead of creating the illusion of reality, the works prefer (like Antonioni) aesthetic fascination with the object, the process, the understanding of a system subservient to its relationship to a greater social structure: for instance, what it means to be a female, what it means to be German, what it means to create this type of work as this type of artist? These are conclusions that draw more questions than answers…
REGINA NIEKE
Regina Nieke’s bold, impassioned paintings consider fundamental questions surrounding a – generally solitary – figure in the picture. Her consideration of this figure bounces in and out of autobiography and fantasy for Nieke, the figure is in constant movement, yet simultaneously frozen within the painting – perishable, a fleeting existence in paint – awash in a flood of medium or as the sensuous impasto remnants of the painterly gesture. Nieke’s relationship to her medium presents an open radical, aggressive, and empathetic tale of lonely, metamorphosing beings. Portraits of humans are reduced to grotesque masses, yet handled with such technical grace and mastery, presented with simultaneous beauty and horror.
What remains of importance in Nieke’s work is that content and technique become a unified entity shadows in paint suggest bodies merging with the background transparent heads and faces are reduced to unidentifiable thickened masses of paint. In this regard, precision is unimportant, in favour of the intensity to technique. For Nieke, the canvas is a platform to destroy and renew, and the works both bellow with intensity and issue a quiet resonance.
REGINA NIEKE (b.1980) holds an MFA from the esteemed Universitat der Kunst UdK in Berlin, Germany. She is a recipient of the 2011-2012 Dorothea Konviarz scholarship. Solo exhibitions include Werkschau, Infernoesque. Project Space, Berlin 2011. She lives and works in Berlin.
FRAUKE WILKEN
Working and living in Germany, Frauke Wilken’s sculptures are in some respect, an organic counterpart of space; suspended, hanging and dangling above the ground. The artist does not consider the pieces a reflection of reality, instead, they represent the uncertain, the unstable and the mysterious and explore the transient moment of the in-between. Her work is about the freezing of movement, in other words, the sculptural fixation of this short moment of shift – when the condition of the object is transformed and something that is initially ugly to the beholder becomes a thing of beauty and of intrigue.
At the same time as the sculptures are left motionless, they are still inherently capable of movement, even without a motor. A cocoon-like form keeps a secret by withholding the possibility of life inside of its shell. One can never know what kind of transformations it might be destined to make and at what moment because its surface doesn’t entrust any indications to the beholder. A quiet and apparently secure atmosphere can therefore easily become unstable, precarious and uncomfortable.
The materials of the sculptures symbolically transmit the impression of skin, fat, fur, nakedness and isolation. This visual experience that lurks directly on the surface of the sculptures reveals nothing more of its inner core, leaving it to the spectator to complete the missing fragments.
Wilken studied Fine Art at HBK Braunschweig and at the Facultat de Belles Arts in Barcelona Spain. She is the recipient of several grants including the Sympo-Fibres International, Montreal/Canada, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, New York/USA and the Stiftung Kunstfonds grant in 2008.
Selected solo exhibitions include, vertraulich Volksbank Kaiserslautern in cooperation with the Museum Pfalzgalerie Kaiserslautern (2012), Gallery Elten & Elten, Zurich, Switzerland (2011), Ruckenansicht, Stadtgalerie Saarbrücken Schläfer, Landesmuseum Bonn (2008) and Gallery Schuster, Frankfurt (2006). Notable group shows include three separate exhibitions at Galerie Land en Beeld, Leerdam, Netherlands (2010-2012), Centre Pasquart, Biel/Switzerland (2011)’10 Jahre Vorgebirgspark Skulptur, Moltkerei Werkstatt, Köln (2009) and Glück-Welches Glück, Deutsches Hygiene Museum, Dresden and ‘Legato 2’ Centre d’exposition, Saint-Hyacinthe, Montreal/Canada.
HEIKE JOBST
“In the freehand drawings by Heike Jobst we encounter the same motifs as in her installations. Heike Jobst is a perfectionist. She does not show us unfinished workshop sketches with a pronounced congenial ductus of improvisation. Instead, all of the drawings have been meticulously executed and expertly perfected. She concretely renders the object, but strongly reduces it, and then put it on the paper with exaggerated clarity and hardness of the pencil mark and contrast. As a result of this, the picture motifs are heightened and abstracted and shifted to an otherworldly sphere of perception consisting of nightmares or pipe dreams, mystery and play-acting. Heike Jobst simply loves to alienate things. In her subtle works, the artist prefers artistic leeway, which she likes to refer to as “inversions.” The option of laterally reversing things is one such inversion, or she switches around positive and negative, and thus, figure and ground, by darkening the light part and lightening the dark.
In her drawings Heike Jobst often makes use of a substantially obvious material as carrier – this may be lengths of cloth, canvases, or metal plates – their material characteristics adding to the effect of the motifs, making us conscious of them. And vice versa, on the spatial installations we find elements of drawing everywhere, which frequently surprise the viewer upon their discovery.
Returning again to a central moment in the artist’s work, as a matter of fact, the human figure has been completely left out of most of the works. This would not be so surprising in still life or landscape genres. But with elements that clearly refer to culture and civilization this is disturbing.
Heike Jobst’s works show projection areas and empty spaces. The relationship to what is on it and in it remains shaky.”
- Olaf Mückain (curator at Museum Heylshof, Worms, Germany) about Heike Jobsts’ work.
