BERLIN/MIAMI

 

MIAMI

                             

Current Exhibition

Menno Aden - Photography
Solo Exhibition
On the occasion of Art|Basel|Miami Beach 2011
03 to 23 December 2011

Opening Reception Saturday the 3th December 7pm - 10 pm

 

 

 

IMAGES

classroom 2010

EXHIBITION TEXT

 

MENNO ADEN

ROOM PORTRAITS | TRACKS AND FIELDS

The photography artist, Menno Aden has been working on his series Room Portraits since 2005. He

portraits public and private spaces from a top view as if the ceiling has been taken off. At first the

mostly deserted spaces and rooms look like scale models. Only at a closer look one realizes that the

rooms are real. This impossible perspective is made possible with the help of a camera scanning the

room in up to 100 pictures from just below the ceiling downwards. The photos are then montaged at

the computer into a single picture.

The thus represented rooms' dimensions can be taken in in just one look. Similar to architectural

drawings, which use top views as planning device and transform three-dimensional space relations into

the two-dimensional, Aden's photo montages lack the depth of space. Only the shadows, appearing

now and then in the pictures, hint towards the three-dimensionality.

The imitation of this planning attitude creates an 'absolute' picture. Aden's top view suggests God

having an eye on private spaces.

This omnipotent point of view reduces the autonomy of 'my home is my castle', the sketch of our

personal designs for our lives, to a provocative matter-of-fact level that reveals immediately private

systems of order. The association of the permanently present observation camera is only too obvious.

The voyeuristic tinge underlies especially Aden's top view into secret retreats, such as private homes.

Aden's portraits are matter-of-fact and abstract at the same time. They offer the observed as an artistic

pattern of interpretation. Aden's modus operandi reminds one of Niklas Luhmann's thesis that every

individual generates new assessments of the environment from the sum of observations made by the

individual without ever being able to reflect upon preformed cultural patterns. In Aden's work these

mechanisms are aesthetically exposed.

The series Tracks and Fields (2009/10) focuses more on the unusual choice of the picture's content than

on perspective. Here Aden analyses systems of collocation in our developed surroundings (tube

stations). The for our eye unusual upright format restrains space to a semi-abstract play with colour and

surface. Tracks and Fields is the continuation of the series Parallele Heimat (Parallel Home, European

Award of Architectural Photography, 2009) showing in compressed forms and colours the tamed

nature of front gardens.

Uwe Goldenstein

 


 

Last Exhibition

Oscar Hidalgo:

 

Klick the image above  to see more

 

      

      

      

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Last Exhibition

drawings

Xenia Fink

07 May - 31 May 2011

GALERIESCHUSTERMIAMI
 2051 NW 2nd Avenue
 Miami, FL 33127
786.266.2445
info@galleryschuster.com

www.galleryschuster.com

GALERIESCHUSTERMIAMI is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Berlin based artist Xenia FInk. The “ drawings” opens 14.May. during the Wynwood Second Saturday . The exhibition will be open one week before the official opening. All drawings are done during the ISCP Grant 2010 in New York.

 

 

 

 

 

Xenia Fink (born 1979 in Sao Paulo, Brazil) was raised in Brazil and Mexico before moving back to Germany to study Illustration at the University of Applied Sciences in Hamburg and finished with the Master in Painting at the UDK in Berlin. Recent exhibitions include group shows at the Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, Berlin; Galerie Schuster, Berlin and Miami; and solo shows at the Galerie Volkspark and Halle and Galerie Schuster, Berlin. and now GALERIESCHUSTERMIAMI.

Xenia Fink provides the figures in  pictures with contradictory character traits. They are never reduced to being good or evil but are full of nuances. She succeeds in creating droll figures doing crazy things. Thus the limit between fiction and reality dissolves. Sometimes this becomes threatening, sometimes it sets you free and sometimes it is just wonderful. The artist’s tableaus are also infused with a repertory of stylistic and formal elements of the modern pop culture. Stanley Kubrick and David Lynch are perceptible as are the framing of the images which overall are reminescent of cinematography.

Xenia Fink`s bold croppings and close-ups show figures, scenes and objects that are of such vividness as if she had photographed them with pencil and brush. For the viewer it is a foolhardy game of illusion and reality and there is the danger of totally losing one`s footing.


Manon Bursian, directorin of the Sachsen-Anhalt Art Foundation

GALERIESCHUSTERMIAMI