Pavel Pepperstein

Pavel Pepperstein "political hallucinations"


Opening on Friday 6 September 2002 from 7 - 9 pm
Exhibition from 7 September - 19 October 2002
Opening hours Wed - Fri 1 - 7 pm, Sat 1 - 6 pm


Galerie Kamm is pleased to present "political hallucinations", a solo exhibition by the russian artist
Pavel Pepperstein (*1966).

As an artist and writer, Pavel Pepperstein belongs to the new generation of russian conceptual art. At the end of the 80s, with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, he was a founding member of the artists' group
"Inspection Medical Hermeneutics", whose goal was to create an artificial subculture to enable them to maintain a critical distance from the events of the day. At the centre of their artistic practice lies the relationship between text and image and their endless references to fur-ther texts and images. Along the way, images and texts from mass culture are not only quoted - their inner mechanisms and processes are examined.

Pavel Pepperstein's solo exhibition "political hallucinations" is also based on this background. In his watercolours, the artist combines
political signs without making a clear political statement.

Pepperstein amplifies an atmosphere of 'forgotten content' by referencing the aesthetic languages of artists such as Kandinsky and Malevich, and political posters and caricatures from the first half of the 20th century - the political aspects of which today lie in the shadow of their
aesthetics.

"Politics generally uses and constructs hallucinations. The danger is that it is not stated that they are hallucinations, on the contrary they are presented as reality. In this exhibition I would like to show how to analyse hallucinations -without commentary, only by virtue of the fact that I reconstruct them". Pavel Pepperstein

Pavel Pepperstein's exhibition "dream and museum" at the Kunsthaus Zug is running parallel to the exhibition in the gallery.


In the office, Cornelia Schmidt-Bleek's new series of drawings "the
unfinished drawings of Captain Cook" are on show. Citing the
documentative practices employed on Captain Cook's voyages of discovery in the 18th century, her drawings extrapolate from and build on the
subjective and fragmentary style to be found in a rudimentary inventory of exotic flora and fauna from Australia and New Zealand.