Pavel Pepperstein Cornelia Schmidt-Bleek
Opening Friday, September 8, 2006, 6 pm - 9pm
Exhibition September 9 - October 21, 2006
Opening hours Tue - Sat 11am - 6pm
PAVEL PEPPERSTEIN Landscapes of Future
Pavel Pepperstein's drawings link figures from Russian myths and fairy tales with signs and symbols from psychoanalysis, politics, literature, art and medicine. His work shifts between concrete image and visionary idea, whose combination creates a critical distance to current events. In the exhibition LANDSCAPES OF THE FUTURE the consideration that the future is abstraction (or abstraction is the future) and the future needs its own space, led him to the idea that landscape motifs with abstract forms could be seen as landscapes of a far distant future.
Someone (let's call him/her The One) concentrates on the image. It can be any image, indeed, but let's call this image The Picture.
IN THE FIRST MOMENT The One see The Picture as "something" (little "mister x" which must be considered)
IN THE SECOND MOMENT The One see The Picture as "food" : it means The One understands that he/she can digest (understand) The Picture.
IN THE THIRD MOMENT The One finds out the fact that The Picture is "bad food": it has something in it (something hard, or raw, or rotten) which can't be digest (consumed, to be understood).
IN THE FORTH MOMENT The One see The Picture as "mirror" : The One see reflection of The One. This is the moment when The One can touch his/her soul within The Picture.
IN THE FIFTH MOMENT The One finds out that he or she doesn't have soul. In this moment he/she calls The Picture "secret animal".
IN THE SIXTH MOMENT The One realises that he or she is not The First One. In this moment The One calls The Picture "enemy".
IN THE SEVENTH MOMENT The One realises that he/she is not alone anymore. From this moment on instead of The One we have They.
IN THE EIGHT MOMENT They turns from The Pictures, because The Picture is boring and accidental.
IN THE NINTH MOMENT They look back to The Picture and (for the first time) They start to remember something, which has been deeply forgotten.
IN THE TENTH MOMENT They see that The Picture is in fact, just modest image of future or (more precisely) image of the time, when They will not exist. In this moment They call The Picture "happiness'.
Pavel Pepperstein, KaZantipe, 2006.
CORNELIA SCHMIDT-BLEEK Plotting Revolution under an Apple Tree
Cornelia Schmidt-Bleek's work regularly draws on elements of botany to describe social and political conditions. In her current exhibition PLOTTING REVOLUTION UNDER AN APPLE TREE, the artist takes the apple as a point of departure to weave together various stories marked by the pioneering spirit and moments of knowledge.
One of these is the falling apple that inspired Isaac Newton to develop his theory of gravitation, thus becoming the symbol of a revolutionary physics. In the form of a filigree and translucent curtain made of threaded apple seeds, Cornelia Schmidt-Bleek copied the circumference of the tree under which Newton is meant to have sat in 1666 when the apple fell. On the one hand, the artist thereby describes a space of discovery and inspiration, on the other hand, the seeds recall genetic codes and the surfaces of microchips, at the heart of every computer.
It probably wasn't a seed that lead the inventors of Apple Computer to choose a picture of Newton sitting under a tree for their first logo. Rather, the revolutionary aspect this scene contains should stand symbolically for the revolution of Apple Computer. However, because of bad reproducibility, this logo was quickly discarded and replaced by the silhouette of an apple with a bite taken out of it.
Cornelia Schmidt-Bleek transforms the original logo, enlarged, into a work of intarsia, thus playing with the apparent contradictoriness that not only affected the inventors of apple, but also the whole hippie movement of the late 60s in the USA: back-to-nature on the one hand and accelerating technological developments on the other.
One thing to come out of this counter-culture lifestyle was the mail-order catalogue 'Whole Earth Catalog - access to tools', which Cornelia Schmidt-Bleek uses in another work. The Whole Earth Catalog offered the possibility of becoming independently informed about the most diverse themes, it summarised the philosophical ideas of the time, but also gave practical tips, and was described by one of the inventors of Apple Computer as a precursor of Internet search engines.
The apple as link for a branching network extending across art history, science, life culture and legends, but also an image for alternative and new ways of life.
