Exhibition Badischer Kunstverein

Hellersdorf Love Songs (Karlsruhe edition)
Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe (Germany)
16.02. – 07.04.2002 / Opening on Febr. 15, at 7:00 p.m.

on Friday, Febr. 15, at 11:00 a.m.

For many years BKH Gutmann has been dedicating his artistic work to viewing spaces and bodies, the examination of perspectives. How, and in relation to what, are things viewed if they are not to be merely recognised? What meaning does that which is seen have when it exists in multiple contexts? How are perceptions correlated which enrich one another through visual criteria? How is attention focussed in perceiving that which exists equally, side by side?

Gutmann examines such questions of aesthetic perception with different experimental installations, which may be articulated sculpturally, photographically, by drawings or by objects.

Last spring he presented a new complex work in the HO gallery in Hellersdorf, a satellite town of Berlin, which portrays equally both the familiar, and the greatest possible range of his style. These “Hellersdorf Love Songs” are now being shown at the Badischer Kunstverein in a “Karlsruhe edition”.

In this context, the exhibition rooms are transformed into a vessel for a second architecture embodied by removal cartons and packaging materials. It divides the room into different sculptural zones and manifests superficially – as a plinth, a place to put things, a wall, or a shelf – as a carrier of diverse information and fleeting records (fragments, photographs, newspaper clippings etc.). In contrast to the roughness and “inferiority” of the materials, the individual compositions have been assigned titles such as “For Resy D.”, “Song for Luis”, “Song on a record” or “I will always love you”. The visitor strolls within and along this urban model and – by means of formal analogies, known symbols or references – tries to read it like an accessible archive. The sum of the visual, however, defies deciphering, it reveals as much as it conceals. It pervades the exhibition rooms, so to speak, like a melody or a sculptural drawing.

BKH Gutmann, born in Buenos Aires in 1955, lives in Berlin where he participated in the “Material & Effect” project during the 1980s. In 1991, he was awarded the PS 1 scholarship for New York.
Individual exhibitions by BKH Gutmann were also on display at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, at the Wilhelm-Hack Museum in Ludwigshafen, at the Photogalleriet in Oslo, at the Stadtgalerie in Bern, and at the John Gibson Gallery in New York.

The exhibition at the Badischer Kunstverein is accompanied by a catalogue with texts by Eugen Blume, Amnon Barzel, Peter Herbstreuth, Oliver Brendel, and Angelika Stepken.