2024-07-21 13:12:00
QAcross the entire image area is written in white block letters what could be read as the program statement for the entire exhibit: “I say I am not a white European female artist.” female artist -, French artist Hélène Delprat creates a protest in her speech art. It rejects any customization that has already been written in order to clear the view for the wrong view.
Delprat is one of 19 international artists born between 1895 and 1996 that gallery owner Esther Schipper has assembled for an ambitious group show – beyond her own art program. The title of the poem “Twilight In The Promised Land” does not promise the sharp light of gender, race or national categories, but rather a semi-darkness permeated by ambivalence and fluidity. The title is inspired by a poem by African-American poet Harryette Mullen, which stands for hope in the impossible despite all human experiences.
On the eve of this promise, the exhibition appears as a kaleidoscope of little-known artistic situations, all of which are characterized by a very personal style and history. Without further details on the walls, the audience is encouraged to explore and orient themselves in the exhibition made of wood and steel by Emilia Margulies.
With a cross-shaped center and four diagonals converging towards it, it opens several visual axes between images. Whether sensual or spiritual, historical or abstract, realistic or realistic, life or inspiration, a selection of works from the last 80 years from almost every computer is accessible without satisfaction.
A new woman in Paris
On the steel walls across the center of the gallery, four artists mark the center of the exhibition with small format paintings. A self-portrait in the Art Nouveau style shows Pan Yuliang (1895-1977) as the “New Woman”. He was the first Chinese artist to come to Paris in the 1920s and developed his own fusion of Western and Eastern painting styles, especially in his female nudes.
Pan Yuliang: Nude with Tulips
Quelle: Courtesy the artist, Private Collection, and Esther Schipper, Berlin/Paris/Seoul; Photo © CHROMA
Next to it is the iconic “María Sabina” (1986) by the Chilean poet, actress and human rights activist Cecilia Vicuña, who was honored with the golden lion for her life’s work in Venice in 2022. It shows the Mazatec shaman with his hands in his lap full of hallucinogenic mushrooms, which made him a cult figure in pop culture.
Classical art in the purple tones of the Israeli artist, philosopher and psychoanalyst Bracha L. Ettinger (born 1948), for whom the North Rhine-Westphalia Art Collection will host a solo exhibition at Haus K21 in Düsseldorf next year , appears almost psychedelic. True still lifes painted in the style of the old masters by the “Madrilenian Realist”, as Isabel Quintanilla (1938-2017) called it, create greater intensity and harmony. It has just achieved posthumous recognition with a retrospective at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid.
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Bettina von Arnim, born in 1940, can be traced back to Germany; The futuristic vision of their landscapes and labyrinths is combined with a romantic love about unstoppable technological progress. Pia Krajewski, born in 1990, was influenced by Arnim’s visionary work and studied with Andreas Schulze in Düsseldorf. In painting, he combines natural and artificial forms to create fascinating art objects that, when looked at closely, turn into independent proponents.
Anys Reimann is also from the Düsseldorf Art Academy and, with his solo exhibition at the Folkwang Museum Essen in 2023, he will be one of the shooting stars not only on the art market. The actress, born in 1965 in the Ruhr region as the daughter of a German mother and a West African father, is strong with her own strength in painting compositions of hybrid female bodies.
Anys Reimann: My sad smoking
Quelle: Courtesy the artist, VAN HORN Düsseldorf, and Esther Schipper, Berlin/Paris/Seoul; Photo © J. Bendzulla
Topics related to cultures and generations also concern the youngest participant and multimedia artist Monilola Olayemi Ilupeju (born 1996), who currently lives in Berlin. A portrait painted on green shows the interior with her mother as a young girl arriving in America from Nigeria. Kamala Ibrahim Ishag, born in 1939, is deeply rooted in her Sudanese origins and is simultaneously inspired by the dark visions of William Blake and Francis Bacon through art studies in London.
Her Sahara yellow painting “Ilana (Zaar)” radiates the spiritual power of the Zār ritual, which was primarily performed by women. Just like the sky blue “Blues for the Martyrs,” dedicated to the victims of the peaceful democratic protest in the Khartoum massacre of 2019, it was already on view in its retrospective at the Serpentine Center in London two years ago.
Two artistic positions from the Middle East represent a determined individuality and oppose social conventions in very different ways: the Lebanese painter Huguette Caland (1931 – 2019), who goes through the stages the same in life as his colleague Etel Adnan in Paris and California, impresses with his reduced Sign language and abstract paintings with a strong voice.
With her hybrid drawings, the Israeli artist and trans woman Roey Victoria Heifetz (born 1978) ensures the greatest possible visibility of the female body in the transition of age and gender. And the Korean artist and philosopher Lee Jinju (1980) uses the traditional technique of his homeland to create scientific landscapes with vivid illusions that are hyperrealistic and symbolic at the same time.
Bettina von Arnim: Traditions
Source: Courtesy the artist, Philipp Pflug Contemporary&Esther Schipper, Berlin/Paris/Seoul Photo©Wolfgang Günzel/©2024 VG Bildkunst Bonn
As was the case three years ago in the group show “L’ipe au Voyage”, Esther Schipper is also showing many female artists this summer, without reducing them to a male identity or even a female look. Instead, from a feminist perspective, it is about losing the idea of gender-specific characteristics of painting.
The twilight theme of the exhibition also opens the playing field to combine the knowledge of the collection of the gallery owner and his team in a joint project and to expand personal views, namely to have new historical and contemporary situations for a new audience . Even if this does not result in a compelling concept in the context of a gallery exhibition, it surprisingly shows what painting has an offer: a term of mixed forms, changes and metamorphoses.
“Twilight In The Promised Land”, Esther Schipper GalleryBerlin, until August 24, 2024
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