PREVIEW: Times & Homo Ludens

Situated in a beautiful nature setting outside of Hamburg, the WAI (Woods Art Institute) invites the public to explore the private collection. Rik Reinking, instigated the collection and already bought his first artwork at sixteen years old- a self-portrait by Horst Janssen. Together with his wife Anna-Julia, the collecting pair founded the Woods Art Institute as a lively, international art and meeting place.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: WAI Archive

The WAI is also a place for historical and new architecture, as well as events of all art fields to Hamburg and the region. Located in a western extension of the Sachsenwald Forest, the park area, designed by Rudolph Jürgens and laid out in 1914 as the country estate of a Belgian merchant, now encompasses a picturesque ensemble of thatched half-timbered houses, a functional building from the 1940s and the modern exhibition house of the WAI Galleries with the Reinking Collection. Two exhibitions are on show: “Times” and “Homo Ludens”. “Times”: On July 3, 2001, shortly before the G8 conference in Genoa, the Italian-British artist Vanessa Beecroft staged African migrant women in the hall of the Palazzo Ducale in the manner of a tableau vivant. Her Caravaggio-esque work plays on the contrast of power embodied by the city‘s palaces and the vulnerability of the African migrants who stand lost outside its walls. The video work is flanked by paintings by the Greek artist Dimitris Tzamouranis. The concept underlying the paintings is based on the use of a rhetorical figure. In these paintings, Tzamouranis works with the figure of reversal. He shows something in them that he basically doesn‘t show at all. The artworks consists of a dozen large-format pictures (oil on canvas) and several small-format sketches and pictures (oil on copper). At first the title of the exhibition brings in our mind the Roman name for the Mediterranean Sea. The term originally was used by Romans to refer to the Tyrrhenian Sea, following their conquest of Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica during the Wars with Carthage. By 30 BC, Roman domination extended from the Iberian Peninsula to Egypt, and the term began to be used in the context of the whole Mediterranean Sea. But the If we look at Tzamouranis’ seascapes, which were inspired by the Mediterranean and the politics of our day, it seems everything but familiar and domesticated. In his works the sea has risen threateningly. His waters pile up to form powerful waves, often against a nighttime background in which no horizon can be seen. If we read the titles of his works we see letters and numbers that form geographic coordinates. Thus the title of the exhibition brings back to our mind the “Operation Mare Nostrum”, a year-long naval and air operation commenced by the Italian government on 18/10/1313 to tackle the increased immigration to Europe during the second half of 2013 and migratory ship wreckages in Mediterranean Sea. On June 2015, Dimitris Tzamouranis left his native city, Kalamata in Greece, on his boat and traced parts of these escape routes until he reached the sites where the tragedies occurred. Last summer the artist continued his cartographic journey together and visited further disaster sites in order to be able to reproduce this mood in his painting. His paintings show the sea that has buried its casualties. The only clue to these dramas of human loss is in the titles of the paintings, also he recorded the tragic sites in a sea chart he made that accompanies his “Mare Nostrum” pictures, essentially turning his works into memorials. A wall of sleeping bags is positioned next to these works in the middle of the room. A closer look reveals that the cases are filled with newspaper. Stuffed to the brim with daily reports of political events from all over the world. So no real sleeping bags after all, just the romantic image of a travel group or even the sad reality of those who are fleeing and looking for protection? The sculpture “Tausend und eine Nacht“ by the Dresden sculptor Thomas Judisch invites you to use it. Provides support and helps to connect with the works. “HOMO LUDENS” that tells a story of postmodern and contemporary art from the spirit of the game. “Themed rooms” in the WAI Galleries deal with social and cosmic conditions and contexts, such as the search for identity and gender, playing with time and space, the body and nature. The exhibition shows the “homo ludens”, the playing people, in a double interpretation: In the definition of a researching artistry, which deals with its own reality in experimental arrangements and considerations, defines its visual language and thus finds a personal artistic vocabulary. As well as in the collector’s creative play with the selected objects. The collector “paints” himself, as Duchamp so aptly put it, “his own collection”. By selecting, combining and arranging, he becomes the “artist squared”. (Marcel Duchamp)

“Times” works by: Vanessa Beecroft, Dimitris Tzamouranis, Thomas Judisch

“HOMO LUDENS” works by: Carl Andre, Hermine Anthoine, Miroslav Balka, John Baldessari, Lothar Baumgarten, Rolf Bergmeier, Joseph Beuys, Guillaume Bijl, John Bock, Baldur Burwitz, Michael Buthe, Chapman Brothers, Maurizio Cattellan, Martin Creed, Max Cole, Hanne Darboven, Samy Deluxe, Madeleine Dietz, Henrik Eiben, Johannes Esper, Brendan Fowler, Tom Früchtl, Hamish Fulton, Os Gemeos, Markus Genesius | WOW 123, Liam Gillick, Gregory Green, Katharina Grosse, Hans Haacke, Georg Herold, Horst Hellinger, Edgar Hofschen, General Idea, Christian Jankowski, Folkert DeJong, Seljia Kameric, Jon Kessler, Mike Kelley, Suchan Kinoshita, Edward und Nancy Reddin Kienholz, Franticek Klossner, Terence Koh, Magda Krawcewicz, Alicia Kwade, Peter Land, Rachel Lachowicz, Wolfgang Laib, Sherrie Levine, Maria Marshall, Thom Merrick, Jonathan Meese, Olaf Metzel, Jill Miller, Piotr Nathan, Bruce Nauman, Ernesto Neto, Tim Noble & Sue Webster, Damian Ortega, C.O.Paeffgen, Markus Paetz, Guiseppe Penone, Dan Peterman, Wolfgang Petrick, Merlin Reichart, Klaus Rinke, Ugo Rondinone, Reiner Ruthenbeck, Ursula von Rydingsvard, Sam Samore, Roman Signer, Michael Schmeichel, Werner Schreib, Patrick Sellmann, Santiago Sierra, Andreas Slominski, Haim Steinbach, Toshiya Kobayashi, Dimitris Tzamouranis, Rikuo Ueda, Vitché, Nicole Wermers, Erwin Wurm, Iskender Yedilir

Photo: Homo Ludens, Installation view, WAI-Wentorf, 2023, Courtesy WAI (Woods Art Institute)

Info: WAI Woods Art Institute, Golfstrasse 5, 21465 Wentorf near Hamburg, Germany, Duration: 23/4/2023-Jan 2024, Days & Hours: guided tours (book here), https://woodsartinstitute.com/