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YOUNG EUROPEAN LANDSCAPE

LANDSCAPE & FIGURE

GABOR A. NAGY HUNGARY

KONSTANTIN DÉRY HUNGARY

RENÉ HOLM DENMARK

ANNE WÖLK GERMANY

JUAN BÉJAR SPAIN

DEENESH GHYCZY GER / HUNGARY

JEAN NOËL SCHRAMM GER / GREECE

INTO THE WILD

MIRJAM SIEFERT GERMANY

FRANZISKA KLOTZ GERMANY

HORST WAIGEL GERMANY

PETER HAMPEL GERMANY

STEPANEK & MASLIN GER & UK

SZILÁRD CSEKE HUNGARY

FABIAN FALTIN AUSTRIA

TIBOR ISKI KOCSIS HUNGARY

SVÄTOPLUK MIKYTA SLOVAKIA

URBAN LANDSCAPE

JAN ROS THE NETHERLANDS

CHELUSHKIN KIRILL RUSSIA

ANNA SZIGETHY HUNGARY

MARKUS WÜSTE GERMANY

ADAM BOTA AUSTRIA

ADAM MAGYAR HUNGARY

ALBERTO PETRòÒ ITALY

JÓZSEF BULLÁS HUNGARY

CURATED BY UWE GOLDENSTEIN

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UWE GOLDENSTEIN

INSIDE THE WEIGHTLESS SPACE OF LANDSCAPE

Landscape appears in those cases where the spatial continuity and totality of observable reality is successfully fused with a highly reflected, individual experience of reality. Matthias Eberle *

Loneliness Shines. Malcolm Middleton

The swinging child against a monochrome background on the cov-er of this catalogue points to the central idea of this unconventional exhibition of landscapes. The landscape fully disappears in the dark background, to the benefit of the figurative foreground. Furthermore, the motive is generated from a mosaic of letters that very subtly com-ments on the overall situation of a disorientated civilisation. The swing-ing movement of the child in front of a black emptiness symbolises an individual’s instability, detachment and incessant search for orientation – a search for the next and newest alignment within a limitless patch-work of signifying threads which offer neither a foothold, nor a centrally organised texture of meaning. Surrounding us is a permanent buzz of

digitally processed images and slogans in vaguely meaningful con-texts. We are inside a maelstrom of contingent information, and com-pletely lacking the ability to evaluate it. As if we were ourselves part of Gabor A. Nagy’s painting and its particles of text, which seem like lonely, empty metaphors. We thus share the situation of the child sitting on the very edge, floating in front of nothingness. The brief moment of weightlessness experienced during swinging expresses a desire for detachment from our self-made, media-ridden environment. The black in the background could signify a new beginning, a new alignment – but likewise the end of a historically grown culture now in the process of overtaking itself.

The portrayal of landscape as a space of social representation may appear absurd and anachronistic in the face of a dissolving world. How to unite a borderless and technology-dominated world with the well-balanced genre of landscape painting, and its clearly defined rules? But it is precisely the formal and aesthetic underpinnings of the genre that provide a clear framework for the reception, coordination and mirroring of our present-day lifeworld, characterised not least by a confusing simultaneity of styles. Compared with the formal concept of the genre, the questioning and modification of spatial orders evident in contemporary representations of landscape offers impressive insights into metaphorically motivated shifts of meaning. Accordingly, this exhi-bition aims to expose the omnipresent signs of disorientation by focus-sing on artists’ handling of the image space.

Into The Wild is the section of the exhibition focussing on wilderness as a utopian space, marked by a certain accommodation of post-romantic longings for oneness and unity with nature, but nonetheless indicative of irretrievably lost elixir of life. With fading dreams of archaic or roman-tic landscapes and the incessant expansion of urban environments, the self-evident understanding of nature as landscape has all but dis-appeared. Reality as experienced from the perspective of an urban environment is largely based on artificial, media-generated and thus

systemically immanent images. And this situation threatens to lead into a condition of weightlessness, a permanent, nervous levitation.

Eberle’s introductory quote offers a compelling art-historical definition of landscape. It takes the immediate and unmediated observation of landscape as point of departure for the individual interpretation to fol-low. Traditionally, nature is painted and embedded in a formal frame-work consisting of foreground, middle, and background, as Eberle indicates with the terms spatial continuity and spatial totality. Caspar David Friedrich already questioned this trichotomy in 1808 by omitting the foreground in his Monk by the Sea. In the works presented here, the formal embedding of motives in different image layers seems to have become completely redundant. We experience landscape as a black surface, as in the case of Nagy, or in the hyperreal but far removed tree-motive by Tibor Iski Kocsis (p.23). The vanishing point, which serves to pull the layers of an image together in perspective, is absent in the visual order evoked by these artists. It is consciously surrendered for the benefit of a self-defined structure that defies the continuum of space: Anne Wölk’s version of nature is one that ob-structs the gaze (8), while Juan Béjar boldly quotes a pre-renaissance landscape (9). Here, it seems as if the vanishing point has yet to be invented, and a world without a central perspective is subtly evoked. The unusual work is premised on a radical question: aren’t we on the verge of completely revaluating nature, which would necessitate a completely novel scheme, perhaps even an ahistorical viewpoint onto our fragmented present, which can no longer accommodate a single vanishing point, a centralised, totalitarian spatial order?

In this sense, the protagonist in René Holm’s painting also seems to mourn the passing and flowing-away of his self (7). For Holm, the sub-lime experience of nature in a romantic forest setting ends in the ne-gation of a positive experience of nature and death. Franziska Klotz’s impressionist portrait of a reindeer visualises the utopian wilderness with colour particles, streaks, and overlapping layers of paint (10).

COVER: GABOR A. NAGY CHOOSE LIFE 2010 ACRYLICS ON CV 100 √ 280 CM COURTESY OF BSA

Her open style plays with the projections and illusions inside the view-ers’ imaginations, as they struggle to assemble the pieces into a single picture. Peter Hampel’s perspective of a flooded piece of untouched wilderness (13) confines nature to the scale of a minute detail. This pantheistic perspective, in which manifestations of God seem to occur only in small details, is fully dissolved in Horst Waigel’s instructions for a God trap (12). Akin to Juan Béjar or René Holm, cultural norms of inter-pretation are here revaluated and challenged with existential humour. Likewise, weightless glances into the sky – as proposed by Stepanek & Maslin (14) or Szilárd Cseke (15) – point to a metaphysical homeless-ness. The romantic ideal of fusing with nature increasingly becomes an escapist retreat into a private world of desires. A disorientating experi-ence, a lonely state of levitation, exactly as suggested by Jan Ros’ play of spotlights (17). And even a garden chair, a device for contemplation, is irreparably broken (20). Markus Wüste’s marble sculpture – in which the cheap material of the original has been turned into stone and thus elevated into a monument of our times – by its very weight detracts us from any thoughts of wanting to reassemble the chair.

It is no coincidence that the artists in the exhibition were primarily born in the 1970s. Maybe this generation was the last one to have intensively experienced nature through immediate contact, and is thus able to ex-plore the distance between humans and their natural environment with particular acuity. Formally, aesthetically and emotionally, these artists’ works can be seen as blending landscape or nature with their personal identity. The reference to young European landscape describes an at-tempt to redefine the cognitive premises of observing nature and land-scape in the light of the European tradition of landscape painting. This tradition offers both an appropriate formal framework and an aesthetic retreat from which to behold the world with sufficient distance and from a truly human point of view.

* Matthias Eberle, Individuum und Landschaft, Gießen 1980, p. 11 (author’s translation)

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LANDSCAPE & FIGURE

KONSTANTIN DÉRY REFLECTION 2011 OIL ON CV 180 √130 CM RENÉ HOLM CAN I FORGET WHAT I CAN NOT FORGET AND LIVE A LIFE 2009–10 OIL ON CV 190 √ 250 CM COURTESY OF BSA

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ANNE WÖLK EVENT HORIZON 2008 MIXED MEDIA ON CV 100 √ 200 CM COURTESY OF BSA JUAN BÉJAR LA OTRA MIRADA 2008 OIL ON CV 100 √ 81 CM COURTESY OF THOMAS PUNZMANN FINE ARTS

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INTO THE WILD

FRANZISKA KLOTZ A2 2010 MIXED MEDIA ON CV 170 √ 190 CM COURTESY OF CHARIM UNGAR CONTEMPORARY

PETER HAMPEL

INTO THE WILD – WILDERNESS AS A COGNITIVE AND EMANCIPA-TORY SPACE

Society, you’re a crazy breedI hope you’re not lonely

without me.1

Venturing into the wilderness to withdraw from society, consciously exiting from the human community to uncover one’s own standpoint, to shift into an introspective mode and become one with the world, the non-human world: these are practises known to almost every culture in the world.

Despair of society is what frequently precedes an escape from society, and it is often also a despair of one’s own self, the discrepancy between how one wants to be and that which one has become. Thus the journey into uncivilised territories often becomes a journey into the uncontrolled parts of one’s own self. The animal, non-human counterpart sets the standard for one’s own ideal. Irrespective of the hardships and constraints of day-to-day survival outside of civilisation, life in the wilderness seems to guarantee complete (divine) harmony, an effect that has come to be exploited by an entire travel industry. After all, apart from putting physical prowess to the test and offer-ing sensory reintegration, landscapes untouched by humans also promise symbolic self-confirmation, which sees one’s own social value-system being drawn into question by transcendent comfort (reversal of the original sin) and nature’s intangible and hermetically closed self-organisation. Career and money problems shrink before the eternal cycles of the wilderness.2

Many adolescents are just like the young Chris McCandless in Jon Krakau-er’s Novel Into The Wild, readily venturing into the wilderness in order to escape the seemingly senseless rules of an adult life over-determined by society. In the (seeming) lawlessness of wild nature the laws of adult life are at first undone. Free from family, school and everything else that regiments everyday life, untouched nature becomes an emancipatory space. Thrown back upon oneself, one’s own experiences and self-established rules come to matter most. Eventually the necessities of survival call for the rules to be re-tailored to external circumstances, thereby helping the self to find its place in the world at large. Just like in the fairy tale of Snow White, the wilderness becomes the place that offers protection from the perils of adulthood, where

one finds new friends, leaves the infant self behind and becomes the agent of one’s own personality.

Jesus in the desert, the meditation runs of the American Indians, or Alex-ander von Humboldt at the river Orinoco – staying in the wilderness always serves the dual purpose of obtaining self-knowledge and knowledge about the rest of the human community. The step back facilitates observation. The other reveals the differences to oneself. By returning to a form of animism, science reflects its own origins and inherent value-system: We may presume that the taboo of the Polynesian savages is not as far from our own as we may at first glance believe, that the strictures of morality and convention which we ourselves obey share an essential kinship with this primitive taboo, and that elucidating the taboo may shed light on the dark origin of our own ‘categorical imperative’.3

Perhaps dating back to the first cave paintings, but certainly to the sublimelandscape-paintings of the 18th and 19th centuries, artists’ preoccupation with over-powering, wild nature as a cognitive and experiential space serves to address the central questions of humanity: Where do I come from?, How did I get here? and How the hell do I get back again? Thus art comes to play an important role in creating a cognitive space which would otherwise not be available in big cities far removed from any sort of wilderness: Whether one regrets or embraces it, there still exist zones wherein the savage mind, like the wild species, is relatively well protected: this is the case with art, to which our society accords the status of a nature reservoir, with all the advantages and disadvantages that such an artificial creation entails; and it is especially the case in many sectors of social life, which haven’t yet been eradicated and in which – from indifference or impotence, and mostly without us know-ing why – the spontaneous, wild mind continues to thrive.4

Society, have mercy on meI hope you’re not angry

if I disagree.

1. Society by Eddie Vedder from the Soundtrack of Into The Wild, written and directed by Sean Penn, DVD: Universum Film 20092. cmp. HAUBL, Rolf: Wild-fremd? Das Wilde in uns – eine psychologische Entdeckungsreise. In Politische Ökologie, Nr. 59: Wa(h)re Wildnis, München, April 1999, P. 24 ff.3. FREUD Sigmund: Totem und Tabu – einige Übereinstimmungen im Seelenleben der Wilden und der Neuro-tiker, Frankfurt am Main 1972, P. 30 (author’s translation)4. LÉVI-STRAUSS, Claude: Das wilde Denken, Frankfurt am Main 1968, P. 253 (author’s translation)

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HORST WAIGEL GOD TRAP 2010 INSTALLATION INCLUDING INSTRUCTION SHEET

5 MODULES (GOD TRAP, CAT, DIRT DEVIL, MOTHERBOARD, 3 JARS) & DIGITAL PRINT 30 √ 40 CM (SEE ABOVE) COURTESY OF BSA

PETER HAMPEL FLOOD (FROM SERIES FLUCHTPUNKT WILDNIS) 2008 PHOTOSGRAPHS 82 √ 206 CM (TOTAL SIZE) COURTESY OF BSA

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STEPANEK & MASLIN UNTITLED 30-40 2004 OIL ON CV 90 √ 125 CM COURTESY OF EMMANUEL WALDERDORFF SZILÁRD CSEKE YOU NG TREES 2004 OIL ON CV 68 √ 58 CM COURTESY OF GYÖRGY SIMÓ COLLECTION

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JAN ROS CITY WITH CAR LIGHTS 2009 OIL ON WOOD 138 √ 122 CM COURTESY OF RASCHE RIPKEN BERLIN

URBAN LANDSCAPEDETLEF STEIN

INSIDE LANDSCAPE

Representations of landscape have become exceedingly important in European art since the 19th century. In the years following 1800 artists articulated their subjective romantic concepts, which sought to convey art-ists’ individual sensibility in a vocabulary of landscape – as opposed to the strictly representative veduta. The extent to which such approaches challenged both audience and critics is well illustrated by the debates surrounding Caspar David Friedrich’s art, whose paintings repeatedly po-larised the public and as in the case of his Monk by the Sea (1808/10) managed to provoke extreme responses. In this painting as with others, contemporaries could discern something going clearly beyond pure rep-resentation of a landscape’s attributes: like no artist before him, Friedrich was able to use the space of the landscape both as a projection-screen for his inner states and as a means for condensing his religious sentiments, his awe of the Creation and what he perceived to be the order of nature into an aesthetic object. The painter, Friedrich argued, shouldn’t just paint what he sees before him, but also what he sees inside himself. If however he doesn’t see anything inside himself, he should also refrain from painting what he sees before him. In a similar manner and a few years earlier, the poet and philosopher Novalis spoke of romanticising the world. This was to be the task of a subject capable of transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary or the finite into the infinite. Romanticising is thus understood as a dialog between inside and outside, between the I and the world.

Just a few decades later realism and impressionism – following in the foot-steps of outdoor painting – came to conquer all of Europe, but the fas-cination for the romantic landscape has nonetheless persisted. Even the subsequent technical innovations, above all photography, have not fun-damentally challenged or changed it. In an art historical sense there may today no longer by any romanticist art, but what exists nonetheless – as Rüdiger Safranski has rightly observed – is romance itself.

For Young European Landscape, curator Uwe Goldenstein has selected a range of works which lend credibility to the hypothesis of romance’s pres-ent-day relevance. These works do not primarily look back to or quote well-established motifs, and none of the exhibited artists follow the art-historical

examples by using glazing techniques or a maulstick. Rather, these works reflect upon the contemporary means of negotiating human conditions and existential issues in images of landscapes – of conveying contem-porary conflicts between the outer and inner world, and expressing the harmony and conflict between reason and emotion. In doing so, there is a shift both in the artistic techniques used and the aspects of landscape being singled out. Today a multi-dimensional approach to the landscape theme also comprises aspects such as the manipulation of nature and landscape, since the wilderness has evolved into a concrete jungle. And Wolfgang Welsch has pointed out an even graver issue: after Chernobyl, we are faced with threats in dimensions that our senses are no longer ca-pable of perceiving and gauging. A straightforward representation is thus hardly an adequate artistic response to such a complex reality.

In a present marked to the extreme by an intelligence capable of explain-ing and resolving every possible question and phenomenon in an sobjec-tive manner and with reference to scientific parameters, the artistic pen-dulum incessantly swings in the opposite direction, pointing to the almost inexplicable and at times even dark areas of our being. In this sense, images of landscape, however familiar they may at first sight appear, can truly challenge and stun us. The farthermost stars, lying beyond the reach of all instruments, writes Lászlo F. Földény, are part of our world by their sheer existence as objects of the imagination, yet there may likewise ex-ist many things in our immediate vicinity which have nothing to do with the world, since we don’t even imagine them. In the moment of a miracle, something actually becomes part of the world that previously didn’t exist and was unimaginable.

The works assembled in this exhibition are heterogeneous, ranging from the fascination for the remote night sky above nature to a nocturnal condi-tion corresponding to the darkness of the soul, and unleashing all things suppressed by the control and reason of daytime. To speak with Friedrich, who appears to stand in the background as a sort of invisible godfather, the artists shown here have not only painted what they see before them, but also what they see inside themselves.

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CHELUSHKIN KIRILL UNTITLED (FROM SERIES MOSCOW MOOD) 2004 GRAPHITE ON PLASTIC 150 √ 120 CM

COURTESY OF BÉLA HORVÁTH COLLECTION

ANNA SZIGETHY FROM SERIES NICHT-ORTE (ILE-DE-FRANCE) 2006–7 PHOTOGRAPH 50 √ 60 CM

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MARKUS WÜSTE FOLDING CHAIR 2008 MARBLE 80 √ 60 √ 25 CM COURTESY OF BSA ADAM BOTA KRUPPSTAHL I 2010 OIL ON MAP 80 √ 125 CM COURTESY OF BSA

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YOUNG EUROPEAN LANDSCAPE MARCH 4 – MAY 8 2011 COLLEGIUM HUNGARICUM BERLIN

JUNE 16 – AUGUST 6 2011 GALERIE WOLFSEN AALBORG DK

CURATOR / CATALOGUE UWE GOLDENSTEIN

PUBLISHED BY - UWE GOLDENSTEIN &

MOHOLY-NAGY GALLERY OF .CHB – DR. VERUSCHKA BAKSA-SOÓS

GRAPHIC DESIGN LÁSZLÓ NÁDLER

TRANSLATIONS FABIAN FALTIN

INTRODUCTORY SPEECH DETLEF STEIN

© UWE GOLDENSTEIN/ .CHB/ THE AUTHORS/ GALLERIES/ COLLECTORS & ARTISTS

WEB INFO

SELECTED-ARTISTS.COM

HUNGARICUM.DE

GALERIEWOLFSEN.DK THANKS COLLECTORS` ART CLUB BUDAPEST

116-153112-2516195

ADAM MAGYAR URBAN FLOW #1075 (LONDON 2008) PHOTOGRAPH 26 √ 240 CM

SVÄTOPLUK MIKYTA HEDGE 2008, GRAPHIC ON PAGE 8,5 √ 15 CM COURTESY OF E. WALDERDORFF

PAGE 2: MIRJAM SIEFERT HEAVEN IS UNDER CONSTRUCTION 2009 PHOTOGRAPH 113 √ 168 CM COURTESY OF BSA

OPPOSITE PAGE: TIBOR ISKI KOCSIS SENSITIVITY II 2008 OIL ON CV 140 √ 220 CM COURTESY OF DÈAK ERIKA GALERIA BUDAPEST

ALBERTO PETRò FROM SERIES ARCHITEXTURE 2009 PHOTOGRAPHS EACH 100 √ 75 CM COURTESY OF OREDARIA ARTI CONTEMPORANEE

JEAN NOËL SCHRAMM FROM SERIES GREEK LANDSCAPE 2010 PHOTOGRAPH

JÓZSEF BULLÁS #50902 2005 OIL ON CV COURTESY OF BÉLA HORVÁTH

DEENESH GHYCZY IVAN II 2009 OIL AND ACRYLICS ON CV, 120 √ 160 CM COURTESY OF BSA

FABIAN FALTIN DETAIL

FROM PERFORMANCE BIRKEN 2011 VIDEO

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