Artist spaces

In an exciting sequence, the Weserburg presents new artists’ spaces for the fourth time. The artists self-confidently put their works and concepts up for debate. The exhibition thus provides insight into the diversity and quality of artistic production today, which are impressively reflected in the Weserburg’s collections. It is precisely in the differences, contradictions, and confrontations that come to light in the process that the Weserburg’s artists’ spaces respond to the complexity of today’s experience of the world. Several selected rooms have been set up by the artists especially for this exhibition and can be seen as impressive installations only here on site.

Markus Sixay presents quite vividly what today’s living world is almost always about. He fills a room with American dollar bills. This pile of money excites the desire to touch it or even to dive into it like Scrooge McDuck. But at the same time, in ironic exaggeration, he demonstrates that wealth is also only made of paper and requires quite a bit of imagination to appear glamorous, especially since, on closer inspection, they are “artistic blossoms”.

Gregor Gaida brings three dogs to the museum. His sculptures, disturbingly lifelike at first glance, capture the animals’ physicality, size and movement with naturalistic precision, but at the same time test viewers’ expectations with cutouts and unfinished limbs. It takes a few moments to realize how the sculptures dynamize observation and draw attention to their materiality and creative process.

In direct contrast are the works of British artist Fiona Banner. Since the 1990s, she has repeatedly referenced literary texts, films, and also particular historical constellations in various contexts and groups of works-form and material, object and language, surface and pictorial character are thereby excitingly set in relation to one another. On view at the Weserburg, for example, is a larger-than-life drawing of Marlon Brando in his role as Colonel Kurtz from Apocalypse Now or the figure of a fighter jet as a neon work.

Secundino Hernàndez’s room features a new work created for the exhibition at the Weserburg. The Spanish artist works on a large scale, but with the finest brushwork. While his works from the early 2010s feature strong color effects and an almost dialogic proximity to models such as Albert Oehlen, his most recent works stage reduced abstractions in shades of white, black, and gray.

Another room is dedicated to the recently deceased artist Reiner Ruthenbeck. His sculptures, reduced to their most essential, often space-related, have a status all their own, even if their conceptual rigor and material nature are close to Minimal Art and Arte Povera. A group of early works, including “Hängende Glasplatte 1” and “Weißes Banddreick und Metallstab” (White Ribbon Triangle and Metal Rod), addresses fundamental aspects of sculptural work in a fascinating way, thus conspicuously demonstrating the relevance and ongoing topicality of Ruthenbeck’s artistic oeuvre.