ART-PRESENTATION:A Dialogue Between Five Women
Sprüth Magers Gallery has put together an exciting group show featuring five of the gallery’s most prominent women artists. Carefully selected to represent a broad spectrum of different mediums, each artist brings a unique vision and visual language to the overall presentation of works that range from the early ’80’s to 2015, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Cindy Sherman and Rosemarie Trockel have been working with Monika Sprüth since the foundation of her gallery in Cologne in the early 1980s and have been closely connected to the gallery from that era.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Sprüth Magers Gallery Archive
The exhibition takes “as its point of departure” the three all-female “Eau de Cologne” magazines and shows that the gallery published between 1985-89, which featured these artists as well as portraits, interviews, conversations and essays with many other contemporary German and American women artists, writers and thinkers. In 1996 Barbara Kruger produced a series of grainy black-and-white prints as templates for a project in the magazine “Dazed & Confused”. These full-page portraits also featured vibrant red text boxes that appear to reveal the thoughts of the depicted person. The original prints are exhibited, in a new order that the artist revised for the exhibition. Perspectives and viewpoints have always been key to the work of Louise Lawler, and never more so than in the “adjusted to fit” works, where she remakes existing works as wall vinyls, expanding them to the available architecture and wall space. Rosemarie Trockel divides her prints into three major groups, calling each selection of motifs and forms a “CLUSTER”. She has created a new set of combinations for the exhibition. Emerging from snapshots of her daily studio life as well as images that reference her own past artworks, she carefully combines these pictures with images of artists, friends, historic figures and events. Cindy Sherman often uses abrupt shifts in composition to create a mood of disquiet, a practice she has expanded for a new body of photographs. Adapting unpublished images from previous series, the artist constructs new multi-image or multi-panel works. Sherman’s interest in the bizarre and grotesque achieves particular intensity here. The hand-coloured enamel plaques by Jenny Holzer were created in parallel to her Living series, are shown in the exhibition as a large, coherent block. These texts also appear inscribed on granite benches, which stand in a row in front of Lawler’s wall work, while also interacting with Trockel’s ceramic table. The exhibition as a whole is bound by references to each of the artists’ practices, to art history and to present-day social problems. The core question of perception and depiction foregrounded by the works, across the range of dates and the diverse media, mirrors a recurrent discourse in art history at large, and corresponds to the overall focus of the gallery’s program.
Info: Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Cindy Sherman, Rosemarie Trockel, Sprüth Magers Berlin, Oranienburger Straße 18Berlin, Duration: 17/9-21/10/15, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat: 11:00-18:00, www.spruethmagers.com
