Gosbert Adler, Eva Bertram, Antja Dorn, Marc Grümmert, Thomas Kemper, Iris Kettner, Klaus Küster, Knut Wolfgang Maron, Kenneth van Sickle, Janet Zeugner

80 companies and institutions form Essen invite to a festival of creativity.

zone E opening at 11/23/07. & 11/24/07 from 2 - 7 pm.

⇒ Essens Kreative Klasse

In “Sculptures,” we show three perspectives from the work of the Berlin-based artist, Iris Kettner, in monthly installments. Her works reframe fundamental, existential, human dilemmas. From sculptures constructed out of textiles portraying archetypal situations, creatures emerge as convincing beings, magically reeling us into their world and permitting us- if only briefly- to participate in their existence. They seem to paradoxically awaken to life despite their evident alienation.

Images from the exhibition

For a brief thirteen days, zone E presents a room-filling installation from Julia Majewski (1981- ). During the project “Von Wegen, Streifen und Prozessen,” zone E will be taken over and continually changed by the artist. Previously, four empty storefronts were occupied by similar installations and interventions.

In this re-imagined space, transparent layers of images created by the installation of red, green, and blue stripes transform the room. The resulting minimalism affects the room’s urban surroundings as well. We invite you participate in this act of transformation.

For the Closing Reception, Julia Majewski and Knut Wolfgang Maron will be present. Professor Heiner Wilharm will give an introductory address.

Julia Majewski completed a year at the Accademia de Belle Arti Pietro Vanussi, in Perugia, Italy. In 2005, she received the Design Prize of North-Rhine Westphalia. With this project she finishes her degree in Communications Design at the Polytechnic in Dortmund with Professor Sabine an Huef and Professor Heiner Wilharm.

⇒ www.vonwegenstreifenundprozessen.de

Images from the exhibition

From the over fifty-year work of this important New York photographer and film maker, a rare intensity and refinement emerge. Kenneth van Sickle (1932- ) is known for his atmospheric images engendered by the eternal bohemia of Paris and New York. “Miniretro” is a survey of the achievements of this distinguished master, who studied with George Grosz, came early to photography, worked with Robert Frank, and exhibited with Duane Michaels. His work is in numerous collections, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In this presentation, images from diverse periods are juxtaposed: b&w photographs from the 50s, influenced by jazz, are matched with photo collages from the 70s and recent color photos. And so we discover from the currents of time accord arises.

The exhibition will travel to the Kunstverein Roter Pavillon in Bad Doberan, opening on July 14th, 2007.

Further information

Images Roter Pavillon

“Imbisse” from Antje Dorn, re-scales and reevaluates our relationship to the fundamental conditions of our lives. Paintings of architectural sculptures and models, constructions straight out of the classical Modern, shops, kiosks and bodegas, present a full-format typeface that, with a palpable ease, form the words of staple foods in an aesthetically unorthodox way.

Ms. Dorn works in oil and lacquer on a base built of recycled off-set boards with roofing nails, mounted on wood. She relates the terms ”habitation” and “life” to the lexicon of essential sustenance, placeholders for a world that already exists in fragments, so radical and visionary that it has never before been formulated and depicted.

In the commercial world, the brands that broadcast their logos, emblems, and icons loud and colorfully from buildings and skyscrapers, occupy our entire field of vision and trap us in a chain of narrative associations. “Imbisse” explodes these associations with jovial and confident ease. In this context, the paintings respond to these ever-multiplying messages and thereby develop a new form.

The work revisits basic elements of our daily necessities and brings us back to a reformed set of values and hierarchies– ones that we always took for granted and that the Ms. Dorn now finally paints. The artist also references here the semantics of her earlier achievements in drawing, film, and photography.

Further information

This exhibition shows selections from Klaus Küster’s complete work

In (not only) photographic works, Klaus Küster (1941- ) focuses on the contextualizing of reality, image and reproduction. In addition to photo-graphy, he also works with chemical-graphy, photograms and luminoplastic reliefs (LPR). LPR is a technique Küster developed in the early 70s through which a mechanical treatment of the image carrier (paper, film) before the exposure results in a partially 3-D camera photograph or a 3-D photogram.

The photograph presented here from the 13-piece series, “Drittes Licht” (Third Light) from 1990, shows the 18th Century Portrait of a saint. After the “first light” of the painting and through the “second light” of the photograph, a complicity emerges from the oil paint and canvas and the light and shadow of photography that places the original contents of the painting in the “third light” of a timeless, multilateral perception.

Simultaneous to this exhibition at zone E, an extensive retrospective of Mr. Küster’s work will be shown at the Galerie der Stadt Remscheid (City Gallery of Remscheid).

Further information