Groupshow

about a show where nobody knew what exactly was happening with Andrea Marcellier/Camille Dumond/Olga Monina/Thomas Werner

The group exhibition at wieoftnoch is characterized by the special circumstances of its creation. Based on trust, it represents a physical union of four artistic positions that were previously unknown to themselves, to wieoftnoch and to the visitors. A rethinking of control creates a new context.

Andrea Marcellier leads the visitors into the exhibition with her work smoke gets in your eyes. In a performance on the opening evening, Marcellier acted as Maomì Meindl's executor and, on her instructions, installed flowers in a grid of thorns on the weatherproof housing of a surveillance camera: thorns that serve to ward off pigeons are transformed into a holder for flowers and thus into a representation of another form of nature. The performance was not a planned part of the work; it was the result of a nine-hour train delay. The resulting lack of time prevented the installation from being set up before the opening, so that Marcellier had to assemble the artistic work before the eyes of the visitors. This circumstance threw Meindl and Marcellier into the fragility of everyday life, into a dependence on time.

Marcellier's artistic practice focuses on the dialogue between the work and the audience: an imaginary realism that combines a human bond and everyday spectacle. In doing so, she explores common points of reference and constructs a social interstice that she expands and deconstructs in her practice. Through repetition and imitation, the artist creates subtly disruptive situations that reveal the impulse of everyday actions. Based on her ideas, she develops the appropriate form for the realization of her work.

To the right Camille Dumond shows a work on the wall for the first time: the series home is where in which she deals with the question of the feeling of being at home. Even if the work is not politically motivated, it leaves open a political interpretation: The collage of motifs deals with a transparency that reflects a responsibility. Dumond's studio has only metal walls, so for her it is a kind of compromise with the conditions of the working space and the resulting artistic work. In this way, the artist reflects on the definition of home and to what extent artistic work is produced there.

Divided into levels that are connected only by magnets, the work testifies to an openness. Magnets can be removed and new layers placed, the work remains mobile and forms a question waiting for an answer: a mood board that reflects the state of the now. By working multimedia, Dumond underlines the beginning of a process of reflection.

Thomas Werner's paintings are part of the Wandbild für Jerg, which he produced in 2022 in response to the mural by Jerg Ratgeb. Through their vibrant, luminous and expressive colors, Kopf 1 and Kopf 2 fill the exhibitionspace. As quickly as the two paintings have won the gaze of the viewer, they throw them back outside. What happens outside the frame of the canvas? What are the two heads looking at? Where are they going? What is happening around them? The painting show scenes of everyday life: people in motion. People who are now standing in the exhibition looking at it and following their line of sight.

Even if Werner's paintings expand the space and the view of the visitors with their liveliness, they are direct and clear in their representation: What is shown on the canvas is what is, no more and no less. It is the now, the moment and the only reality. The rest is just an unconfirmed assumption.

Werner's work explores the role of painting in our contemporary highly digitalized world. He confronts the viewers with their own contemporaneity.

At an unusual height, the painting Vorschmack by Olga Monina looks at the viewer. A combination of fruits and vegetables and ornaments form a map that asks to be deciphered.

Within the canvas, multilingualism, history and culinary arts meet. By mapping, processing, serving, and contextualizing food, dishes, and taste, she aims to deconstruct patterns of thought about a so-called "Eastern Europe" by incorporating different perspectives. For example, Vorschmack is a dish that originated in the German-speaking world and came to Eastern Europe with the Ashkenazi Jews. In Monina's painting, the viewer can observe how the ingredients of the dish grow. They thus encounter a story that has not yet been told, are challenged to change their perspective on belonging and to reclassify already established thought patterns and connections.

Despite the ignorance of the positions finally exhibited, the group exhibition presents a coherent picture. This raises the question of the necessity of curation, when the artists' individuality is to be preserved. Does this not represent an exclusion of the essential? Doesn't expediency mutate into a weapon against art? Questions that remain as a result of the rethinking of control.

Sarah Albrecht