12 October 2014 – 11 January  2015

Obsessions and Surreal Worlds

Works from the Prints Collection of the City of Esslingen am Neckar

Bahnwärterhaus

Opening: Sunday, 12 October 2014, 11 am

Bringing the subconscious onto paper and designing ambiguous, surreal pictorial worlds: The Galleries of the City of Esslingen present in the Bahnwärterhaus a cross-section of drawings, prints, and photographs from the Prints Collection of the City of Esslingen am Neckar. Right up to today, the artistic investigation of reality sometimes crosses over into the realm of the surreal or the obsessive.

The exhibition probes the fantastical worlds situated between reality and dream. Whether irrational or mystical, obsessive or dreamy, neurotic or provocative—the artistic attitudes are due to pointed approaches. Works from the twentieth century, e.g. by Hans Bellmer, Lovis Corinth or Wols, come into relation with current positions of international contemporary art such as those of Damien Deroubaix, Michael Bauer, or Melanie Smith.

11 October 2014  – 23 November 2014

Guest exhibition of Esslinger Kunstverein

Tobias Rehberger

29 June 2014 – 21 September 2014

Andreas Schulze 

Opening: Sunday, 29 June 2014, 11 am

Andreas Schulze develops his thoroughly independent painterly attitude during the nineteen-eighties and continues to give it a distinctive profile today. He initially works in the Cologne circles of the Mülheimer Freiheit and the so-called Junge Wilden. But early on, he distances himself from their expressive, spontaneous, and subjective style. He occupies a unique position in the painting of contemporary art.

The solo exhibition at the Villa Merkel in Esslingen will be divided conceptually into two parts. For the ground floor of the Villa Merkel, Andreas Schulze is developing a large-format spatial installation and is “furnishing” this level of the former residential building with painterly interventions. As with all of the artist's interventions, themes from his paintings will be expanded in the exhibition space. Found objects are included along with his own sculptures and lamps. Factual and fictional spaces thereby become interwoven. Complex relationships are established between everyday objects and ornamental décor, between unconventional lifestyle and bourgeois normality. Andreas Schulze's melancholic landscapes and interiors convey both coziness and menace; they take up the themes of society's striving after security and comfort and of the alienation inherent to the “private” aspect, in which the bourgeois need for harmony turns out to be narrow and restrictive. And this artist always gets down to business with a characteristic wink and profound humor.

Gunter Reski writes: “The painting of Andreas Schulze supposedly has a lot to do with naïve charm. It comes along with an astounding nonchalance. 

Merkelpark

29 June 2014 - 21 September 2014

Ida Ekblad and Les Frères Chapuisat

Sunday, 29 June 2014, 11am, opening

The installations of Ida Ekblad and Les Frères Chapuisat are part of the event program “Offenbar – Interreligiöse Kulturtage

Debut exhibition at the Bahnwärterhaus

3 May 2014 – 15 June 2014

Byun Chul Kim – Von Oma bis Nietzsche

Opening: Friday, 2 May 2014, 7 pm

Closing: Sunday, 15 June 2014, 11 am

Byung Chul Kim draws. In his new, to some extent large-format works, he visualizes stories and thoughts. These are philosophically subtle drawings. The finesse in the graphic execution corresponds to the refinement of the represented thoughts. At the same time, the minutely and meticulously elaborated drawings stand in direct contrast to the furious pace of fashions and trends.

The viewer can gaze in protracted amazement, can grow contemplative in the reflective response to what is offered to view. With a great deal of humor and ingenuity, Byung Chul Kim opens up a space filled with fantasy and with occasionally strange intellectual games.

Images and concomitant textual notations become intertwined in the storyboard-like drawings in

9 March 2014 – 8 June 2014

HAMISH FULTON – WALKING TRANSFORMATION

Opening: Sunday, 9 March 2014, 11 am

Hamish Fulton, an artist born in 1946 in London, works on an utterly independent oeuvre. It is extremely poetical and bears witness to a distinct, authentic, and cosmopolitan attitude.

For more than forty years now, Hamish Fulton has been transferring the act of moving on foot into an art form―namely the Walks. He creates works of art while walking. He undertakes Walks on all the continents of the Earth, for instance “From Coast to Coast” across the islands of Great Britain. Hamish Fulton transforms the experiences he has during these journeys. On the basis of drawings and photographs collected during the Walks, he designs wall drawings, murals, photographs, texts, and also objects. They may be read as universally valid artistic forms which concentrate the diverse manifestations of the original and immediate relationships of human beings to the Earth, but at the same time they may be understood as a passive protest against urban societies which alienate humanity from nature. “No Walk, No Art” – with this congenial and uncompromising formulation, Hamish Fulton describes his method of working.

He considers the Walk itself already to be a work of art. It arises between the poles of tension and relaxation, concentration and distraction, exertion and recuperation, experience and knowledge. Hamish Fulton seeks insights, not outlooks. For him, the act of walking is also a form of ascertainment with regard to his own person. Thus the artist challenges himself with new tasks during each Walk.

Debut exhibition at the Bahnwärterhaus

9 March 2014 – 21 April 2014

Sascha Patzig

Tod Jenseits Auferstehung (Liebe)

In his new cycle of pictures “Death Beyond Resurrection (Love),” the painter and electrician Sascha Patzig, born in 1979 in Freiberg/Saxony, does not refrain from expressing a sensitivity which explores the moods and changes in our consciousness.

He demonstrates a capability for using painterly quotations to situate the phenomena of an undeniable artistic heritage in a new context and, in spite of a nimble irony, he does not refrain from following existential-moral impulses. The project investigates the relationships between painting to consciousness in general and to a specific pictorial knowledge.

15 December 2013 – 16 February 2014

Wozu Bilder?

Gebrauchsweisen der Fotografie

 

Opening: Sunday, 15 December 2013, 11 am

“What Use Are Pictures?” – especially in today's times, this is a downright radical and simultaneously impertinent question. The same-named exhibition takes as its theme the extremely varied utilizations of photography on the basis of some four hundred photographs from a renowned private collection in southern Germany which are outstanding, even bizarre, sometimes strange, but always astounding.

“Bringing the world home”; “Remembrance”; “Classification”; “Documentation”; “Arousal” – these are a few of the topoi which group examples of historical photography into contentually related picture-tableaus.

“What Use Are Pictures? Utilizations of Photography” at the Villa Merkel turns the customary perspective back onto the medium. The exhibited works have not been selected according to what may be seen upon them or what subjects they offer, but instead with a view to their forms of utilization and application, which are brought to light across a broad spectrum. There are such uses, for instance, as that with the help of photography, nature can be investigated or romanticized, people may be called to mind or traced by the police. Entertaining items may be found under the heading “Jokes.”

15 December 2013 – 16 February 2014

Stefan Panhans 

Schnee schnell Schnee Du bleiches Reh

 

Opening: Sunday, 15 December 2013, 11 am

In filmic works, photographs, and installations, Stefan Panhans (*1967) develops pictorial worlds oscillating between documentation and artificiality. Articles from the world of urban consumption such as brand-name gym shoes, fitness equipment, and granola mixtures serve as props in photographic still lifes or are parts of a meticulously prepared décor for film sets. Moving in these scenarios are mask-like, artificial figures that seem to have lost their way between lifestyle, self-optimization, and media hype.

The videos of Stefan Panhans are shot in a single take and do not adhere to a narrative logic. The concentration is upon a pictorial language and carefully staged monologues and dialogues. There is frequent use of sampling techniques which take up advertising slogans, slang expressions, or marketing language. In the video “ Sieben bis Zehn Millionen” (“Seven to Ten Million”), for example, a person describes at breakneck speed the complications which can arise when purchasing technical equipment. Only upon a second look does the face of the speaking man, wrapped in a fashionable hood with fur collar, reveal itself to be that of a woman. The viewer himself is manipulated in ambivalent images which conceal several layers behind their superficially shining advertising optics.

The video “Sorry” has almost no language at all. It takes place in the overcrowded pullman car of an intercity express train. People shove their way past each other and climb over heaps of gaudily colored luggage. An everyday image in a second-class carriage of the German Railway—if it were not the case that every person is wearing an exaggerated costume inspired by a role model from the world of art and media. Things which seem to have no affinity with each other are fitted together into an opulent image of our era.

The photographs as well are unexpected stagings of contemporary lifestyle and a persiflage on the mechanisms of advertising photography. For the exhibition at the Villa Merkel, a series of photographs have been newly produced and are being presented for the first time.