OH WOW
Meisterschülerausstellung der HfK Bremen. Karin Hollweg Preis 2017
Art that astonishes, that is inventive and surprisingly new – OH WOW, the title of the master student exhibition questions, with an unmistakably ironic undertone, expectations and demands that are still placed on art today. Originality, individuality and expressivity are indeed still circulating criteria for a successful work, but the possibilities and tasks of aesthetic practice go far beyond this, indeed they sometimes and rightly lead these ideas ad absurdum. Art that is on the cutting edge of international debates emerges in a web of references and further developments, signifying critical response and rejection. The large collective exhibition with which 17 master students of the Fine Arts program of the Bremen University of the Arts bid farewell to the completion of their studies is exemplary for this – it shows the diversity of artistic strategies today.
A large part of the exhibited works will be presented to the public for the first time. OH WOW thus provides a multifaceted insight into Bremen’s current art scene. The artistic range of the exhibition is demonstrated by four positions:
Daniel Rossi uses various means and forms of non-objective painting with explorative pleasure. By referring back to the familiar, he creates a completely independent pictorial concept. He uses various textiles and materials, which he modifies, sometimes allowing them to protrude beyond the stretcher frame, and finally extends them painterly with gestural or also calculated color settings and forms.
Felix Dreesen presents nine window elements, each painted over with a number or letter on a large scale. They are relics of a sensational intervention in the outdoor space. The widely visible message on the façade of a condemned building in Bremen is transformed into a cryptic system of signs in the museum. In a subtle way, Dreesen examines the relationship between actionist ambition and aesthetic effect, thereby making visible the possibilities and limits of artistic appropriation.
Ana Baumgart & Ina Schoof deal with current social developments in their multi-part video installation. In impressive images, they approach the question of how certain thought patterns change in a time of great social upheaval. How do identity and community manifest themselves when they feel threatened by the foreign, by other ways of thinking and living?
Jónína Mjöll Thormodsdottir’s fascination with natural forms can be found throughout her extremely diverse oeuvre. Immediately in the entrance area of the exhibition are towering structures that she derives from small bird bones, so-called wish bones. With their curved forms, the large-format sculptures embody a surprising modernity. At the same time, they retain something creative that irritates the investigative gaze.
Curated by Ingo Clauß, Weserburg | Museum of Modern Art
A cooperation with the Bremen University of the Arts
Artists
Ana Baumgart & Ina Schoof, Andreas Bernhardt, Jasmin Bojahr, Amina Brotz, Felix Dreesen, Stephan Fritsch, Tanja Hehn, Elise Müller, Myong-Hee Ki, Norman Neumann, Nora Olearius, Daniel Rossi, André Sassenroth, Malte Stiehl, Yue Sun und Jónína Mjöll Thormodsdottir.
Karin Hollweg Price 2017
A special highlight on the opening evening will be the awarding of the Karin Hollweg Prize. The prize, endowed with a total of 15,000 euros, is one of the most important art promotion prizes at German art colleges. It is made possible thanks to the generous support of the Karin and Uwe Hollweg Foundation. Half of the prize money is reserved for an institutional solo exhibition in Bremen.
From the jury statement: “The Karin Hollweg Prize 2017 goes to Felix Dreesen. His contribution Patches of Protest prevailed after a lively and constructive discussion within the jury.
The starting point of the work is a protest action carried out by unknown persons shortly before the demolition of the historic headquarters of the logistics company Kühne + Nagel on the Weser. In reference to the discussion about the company’s role during the Nazi era, the windows of the building were painted with letters and numbers, which in their entirety resulted in the text: “500 SHIPS 735 TRAINS 1942-1944 MORE THAN ONLY SERVICE PROVIDERS … – – – AGAINST FORGETTING!” In a very short time after the action was carried out, all the affected windows were removed by construction workers. Felix Dreesen has distributed nine windows that remained intact during the demolition process in the exhibition space in such a way that they correspond to their sequence in the text, and combined them with a newspaper article that derives their content.
The jury is convinced by the multi-layered and ambiguous readability of Felix Dreesen’s intervention. On the one hand, it explores the possibilities of art in its entanglement between attitude and form by bringing the material of the demolition situation into the exhibition space. On the other hand, she takes up the protest process and transforms its directness into minimalist-cryptic signs with painterly qualities, without taking away its power. Patches of Protest thus focuses on the effectiveness of art within social discourses.
Furthermore, Felix Dreesen succeeds in taking up a regionally conducted debate in such a way that its generally valid questions come to the fore and history and the present merge.
Furthermore, the way in which the artist stages a game of authorship here is convincing – it remains uncertain who carried out the protest action at the Kühne + Nagel building and originally painted the windows, which Dreesen now presents as found objects and charges with content.
Thus Patches of Protest is clearly more than the sum of its parts and worthy of a prize in its cleverly placed ambiguity.
The solo exhibition associated with the prize in a Bremen institution will take place in 2019 at GAK Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst.”
Curriculum vitae Felix Dreesen:
Felix Dreesen was born in Bremen in 1987, where he still lives and works today. Towards the end of his school years, he and two friends founded a performative and participatory screen-printing collective that still exists today, with its own workshop and regular print sessions at festivals, in theater and art contexts. Before and during his studies he was part of the basic cast of the socio-cultural and electronic music oriented Zucker-Club as a studio tenant. Here he gained deeper insights into collective work structures, participated in the infrastructural concept, spatial designs and community exhibitions. In 2008 he began studying sculpture at the Hochschule für Künste in Bremen with Yuji Takeoka. From 2013 he studied in the class of Natascha Sadr Haghighian, with whom he graduated in 2016. In addition to the birth of his son Zore in 2011, his time as a student was primarily characterized by a series of projects outside of his studies and participation in various space-appropriating groups such as the Berlin-based Reclaim Your City collective, which deals with activist forms of urban appropriation.
Jury:
Verena Borgmann (Kunsthalle Bremen)
Peter Friese (Weserburg | Museum of Modern Art)
Fanny Gonella (Künstlerhaus Bremen)
Wolfgang Hainke (artist)
Dr. Arie Hartog (Gerhard Marcks House)
Dr. Andreas Kreul (Karin and Uwe Hollweg Foundation)
Dr. Ingmar Lähnemann (Municipal Gallery Bremen)
Dr. Annett Reckert (Municipal Gallery Delmenhorst)
Dr. Frank Schmidt (Böttcherstraße Museums)
Janneke de Vries (Society for Contemporary Art)
Catalog
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog in the form of a folder with 16 carefully designed individual booklets. Each booklet contains an introductory text and illustrations of the exhibited works. The catalog will be published on August 3 and can be purchased at the museum box office for 15 Euros. Concept and realization: studio lindhorst-emme
Dates
Music to the film: Friday, June 23 at 8:30 p.m. and 10 p.m., free admission. Conrad Schwenke and Jannik Stock accompany the film die Stadt by Jasmin Bojahr with experimental music.
Record release: Friday, June 23 at 9:30 p.m., free admission. With Tightill and Doubtboy “RNB Anarchy” as part of Andtire Gallery, a project by André Sassenroth.
Curator’s tour: 6 p.m. Thursday, June 29. 3,- plus admission
Concert: Thursday, June 29, 7 pm. Free admission RAW 02. y 0,75 Displacement by Hannes Middelberg. A release evening by Research and Waves and ZCKR Records. RAW is a series of record releases that acts as a collaborative platform between contemporary art and independent music, focusing on the conceptual and experimental use of sound.
Catalog release and artist talk: Thursday, August 3, 2017, 7 p.m. Free admission
Reading: Thursday, October 12, 7 p.m., free admission. Excerpts from the master student work “Para Muster” and artist talk with André Sassenroth.
Further dates to be announced shortly.