Stabile Seitenlage

The term “stable lateral position” – is usually associated with “first aid”. It primarily refers to a life-saving emergency measure. As an exhibition title, however, it suggests that the artworks on display here are intended to shake the viewer awake, expand his lungs, and invigorate his consciousness.

“Stabile Seitenlage – Von der Komplexität Bildender Kunst” shows works by former fellows of the Kunstfonds. The ten artists represented here work with different media, techniques and materials, so at first glance they do not reveal a common “thematic” concern or even one tied to a genre. Instead, the positions presented refer to contemporary social, scientific, political, and societal phenomena across genres. And they do so in a highly subtle, at times also very provocative manner. The works on display are characterized as much by black humor as by poetic sensitivity, historical-political allusions, and anarchic rebellion.

The paintings, sculptures, videos, and spatial and sound installations also allow insights into their processes of creation, which are not straightforward but erratic, contradictory, and highly complex. The “multimedia reflective arc” of their position implied by all the artists always guarantees cross-connections and new perspectives on topics and issues already known but erroneously labeled “exhaustively treated.” In this way, the idiosyncratic subtitle “On the Complexity of Visual Art” almost explains itself.

Viewed in this way, the term “stable lateral position” is also a “contradictio in adjecto”, i.e. a kind of paradox: If something is lying on its side, it cannot actually be stable. An object lying on its side is not immovable, but is on the verge of changing its position. Contradiction, transgression, transformation, and processuality are principles that underlie most of the very different works in this exhibition. They benefit precisely from the artists’ intersecting interdisciplinary approaches, as well as their striving to transpose one genre into another.

The idea and concept of this exhibition were developed by a working group of the Stiftung Kunstfonds. It included Maria Fisahn, Else Gabriel, Hartmut Neumann, Helmut Schweizer, Bernhard Wittenbrink and (now and then) Peter Friese and Sepp Hiekisch-Picard. “Stabile Seitenlage – von der Komplexität Bildender Kunst” was realized as a cooperation of several exhibition houses in Germany. After stops at the Museum Bochum, the Galerie der Künstler in Munich, the Hochschule für bildende Künste, and the Kunsthaus Dresden, this presentation will be on view at the Neues Museum Weserburg Bremen from December 11, 2005 to February 26, 2006.

An exhibition in cooperation with the Kunstfonds Bonn