Guest curators: Alberto Garcìa del Castillo, Agata Jastrząbek, Sophie Jung, Eglė Kulbokaitė
4, rue Wiltheim L-2733 Luxembourg
Tuesday-Saturday 11:00 - 18:00
projects@nosbaumreding.lu
Curated by Alberto García del Castillo and Agata Jastrzabek
- Jakup Auce
- Wojciech Bakowski
- Dorota Jurczak
- Fabian Marti
- Wobbe Micha
- Kenneth Andrew Mroczek
- Monsieur Pimpant
- Agnieszka Polska
Born 1979 in USA. Works and lives in Brussels.
Jakup Auce is profoundly intrigued by the portraying of the visage and the narratives of character-making, generating series of personages that wander inside a retro sci-fi, from glam to cryogenisation, around a theatre of living mechanical puppets. An army of beautiful monsters are the fable of the artist and his surroundings: the embryonic sexuality of nature as the social construct of identity - ?Pas pour ceux qui ont pris les cockrings pour des ronds des serviettes?. Auce has exhibited in In Extenso (FR), Komplot (BE), Inside 15 (BE), Island (BE) and IMT Gallery (UK); he is represented by Nosbaum Reding and Trampoline.
Born 1979 in Poland. Works and lives in Warsaw.
Wojciech Bakowski graduated from fine arts academy in Poznan. His work has been shown (among others) in New Museum, New York in 2009, Schmela Haus, Kunstsammlung Nordhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf in 2012, Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen in 2013, MSN (Museum of Modern Art) Warsaw in 2013. Apart from being visual artist, he is also a poet and a musician (KOT, Niwea). Word, sound and image are Bakowski's basic vocabulary and hence occassionaly become the content of his work. He is represented by Galeria Stereo.
Born 1978 in Poland. Works and lives in Stuttgart.
Dorota Jurczak's macabre and fantastical works combine influences from folklore and mythology, along with inventions of her own imagination. The figures in her work are predominantly indebted to Eastern European iconography and exist in darkly whimsical dream-worlds, surrounded by anthropomorphic animals, creeping woods, hair and all manner of deformed creatures. Jurczak's highly stylised works are like fragments of an ongoing surreal narrative that starts and stops without needing to make any sense. She has been featured in numerous international exhibitions, including the 2006 Seville and Berlin biennales. Jurczak has also presented her work at the Tate Modern (UK), Van Abbemuseum (NL); Kunstraum Walcheturm (CH), CAPC Musée d'art Contemporain (FR) and MMA PS1 (USA). She is represented by Corvi Mora.
Born 1979 in Switzerland. Works and lives in Zürich.
Fabian Marti studied at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Zurich (HGKZ), Department of Photography. In 2008, Marti visited the Mountain School of Arts in Los Angeles. On one level Fabian Marti's photograms and ceramics relate strongly to formalism, abstraction and op art. However, the artist is further interested in the sensations related to a loss of control and the access to the subconscious. Between other venues, he has exhibited solo in Kunstverein Braunschweig (DE), Kunstmuseum Winterthur (CH), Swiss Institute (USA) and Istituto Svizzero di Roma (IT). His group shows include Bank Julius Bär & Co. (CH), Dumont Foundation (USA) Kunsthaus Zürich (CH); Parasol Unit Foundation for Contemporary Art (UK), Walter Bechtler Stiftung (CH) and Zabludowicz Collection (UK). He is represented by Peter Kilchmann.
Born 1985 in Belgium. Works and lives in Brussels.
Wobbe Micha centres his work in the gesture of object-making, the importance of the sculpture laying on "the hand over the surface". Micha graduated from the fine arts programme at Sint-Lukas Brussels in 2008. In 2012 attended Lucy McKenzie's class at the academy of Düsseldorf. He was in residence at WIELS (BE) and in Cité des Arts (FR). His work has exhibited in WIELS (BE), Sint-Lukas Gallery (BE), __(SIC) (BE), Galerie Van der Mieden (BE) and Maison Particulière (BE).
Born 1981 in USA. Works and lives in Brussels.
Kenneth Andrew Mroczek has an object-mediated connection to Nature, granting a capital interest to the social tale that is inherent to architecture with projects such as ?Opa-Tisha-Wocka-Locka? and ?Y?$ I See Stars?. A pretty amount of attention is given to the soul, as if the exhibition room could contain a healing handful of energy; this is not a question of shamanism, but more of a review of a list of aesthetic codes: from handicraft to neo-hippie. He has produced several artist books, frequently collaborating with other artists, such as Anne Daems, Harrell Fletcher, Dan Graham.... Mroczek has exhibited solo at Mehrwert Aachen (DE), Wolfsonian-FIU (USA), Elisa Platteau (BE), Komplot (BE); his work was included in group exhibitions at Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin (FR), Objectif Exhibitions (BE) and MOCA Miami (USA) between other venues.
Born Nicolas Marcon 1986 in France. Works and lives in Brussels.
Monsieur Pimpant graduated from fine arts academy in Tournai. Apart from being visual and sound artist in a broad sense, he is a co-founder of publishing collective 'Edition Gitan'. He has created a brand 'Ultra dead toy' with Stephane Blanquet and Francesco Defourny in 2013. He has developed an authorial drawing programme ' Jeu du dessin', 2010-2013. He desings patterns for a Belgian fashion brand Krjst since 2012. In his own artistic practice Monsieur Pimpant explores the potentials of 3D technology.
Born 1985 in Poland. Works and lives in Kraków and Berlin.
Agnieszka Polska studied at the fine arts academy in Cracow, and the university of arts in Berlin (Hito Steyerl's class). Polska's main medium is animation, video and photography. Her practice is concerned with the processes of reshaping the past by present activities and the productive potential of memory imperfections. She has received Polish Film Award by Polish Film Institut & Musuem of Modern Art in Warsaw in 2013. Her work has been exposed internationally and soon will be shown at 19th Biennale of Sydney. She is represented by Zak Branicka.
Strawberry Sausages
All is double in this show ; i.e. the binary oppositions, an image divided in two parts, strawberry sausages, two curators, double gestures and two texts, things fall into each other coincidentally and infect one another.
THE FOUNTAIN AND THE SAUSAGE
We took a long walk to the lake Leman, the only populated place on Sunday's Lausanne. Walking along the water and retro-pretty flower beds of Lausanne, on our left side, we saw an image. In the middle of the upper part stood a rather normal Swiss nice house, surrounded by a well-cultured garden. Below was a fountain wall in a shape of a wave composed of three horizontal layers. It resembled a birthday cake: bottom thick and white, middle cream like yellow and the top brown glazed. The layers curl along the pavement, one on top of the other, festively extracting liquids.
Alberto thought it was very ugly and I thought it was rather beautiful. We agreed it was a matter of taste.
The focal point of this slice of reality was that it was composed of two aesthetically incongruent parts. The ideal house on top of the hill was somehow levitating above the fountain of peculiar looks.
The brown of the top layer is not the brown of a chocolate glaze. The light brown top, as it curls, waves and shines in Lausanne's sun, resembles a sausage. Yes, a thin light brown long shiny curly regular sausage.
The sausage on top of the cake disconnects the bottom from the top and connects the image with the strawberry sausages show, establishing the sausage a common denominator of all. Strawberry Sausages are about marriage of binary oppositions, where everything will be borderline between sublime and kitsch, deep and cheap, beautiful and repulsive, ''like an astral cake of angels after a slaughter'' (Bruno Schulz, 1934, from Cinammon Shops). A joyful vision of chaos. - Agata Jastrzabek
SOME GIRLS ARE BIGGER THAN OTHERS
It exists a certain time of isolation and there is also the castle: there are those new lives in an old palace. Knowing that Summer is the best season for brick-casting, by the end of each Spring the artist will get a Fed-Ex cardboard-box full of sea mud. A certain amount of management is required to get those busts done for the September "rentrée".
Since the city hosts the headquarters of the IOC (International Olympic Committee), by the lake of Lausanne, in Switzerland, sits The Olympic Museum; its entrance is happily ornate by an innocent cake-lookalike fountain. The waterfall is born over and around a brown concrete "sausage", that shines under the water film when the Sun warms up the Alps. A neoclassic pediment crowns a reddish mansion sitting on the arranged flowery hill.
There is this widely spread fad of interactive museums and Sunday family experiences, this is a matter of museology, as it is what we have between our hands here: a slippery strawberry-flavoured-wurst. A post-martial-invasion "chateau fort" hosts Culturgest, a remarkable art centre in Lisbon. I believe it does not grow from a mountain, but it does seem to when you regard its silhouette climbing over the surrounding residential buildings - do please notice that very close from it you can find a "plaza de toros". The pseudo-organic white monsters of Calatrava in Valencia and the madly cold and windy train station in Liège, Belgium.
Local taste and culinary wandering are overrated ventures, and I do find a certain awkwardness in the over excitement towards foreign cuisine; not to mention, naturally, annoying ethnocentric your-home-is-so-bright astonishments. The text accompanying the previous exhibition at Nosbaum Reding Projects and opening the present series of curated shows reads: "There is that matter of arrangement, also the question of origins and belongings and mainly this concern of good and bad taste". It does refer to a set of measurements issued within the exhibition practice of our contemporaries. These surroundings permit the existence of the fable you are now looking at. Entitled "Strawberry Sausages", this exhibition is a delicious combination; an aesthetic dichotomy showcasing artists practices to which the matter of the persona is midmost, may the artist concentrate in an intimated and isolated studio practice -"Neues Leben im alten Schloss"- or should he divagate from and around the very being of himself -"some girls are bigger than others, some girls mothers are bigger than other girls mothers". - Alberto García del Castillo
