The exhibition "Strangers to Ourselves" explores questions of (self-) depiction and representation in the visual arts since the end of the 19th century.
Major works from Von der Heydt Museum% collections show the ways in which roles defined by societal preconceptions ore inscribed in Images of human beings, and the effect this has an how they are perceived. The exhibition covers a broad range of works, from classical modern paintings by Paula Modersohn-Becker, Emmy Klinker, Toulouse-Lautrec, Christian Schad and Felix Vallotton, to works by Wols, Francis Bacon and Miriam Cahn, and up to the present day, represented by Tobias Zielony and Zanele Muholi, among others.
The title of the exhibition is taken from Julia Kristevo's 1990 book of the same narre. According to her central thesis, we are strangers to each other and resent each other to the same ex-tent that we are strangers to ourselves - and so it shall remain. This is precisely the point the philosopher recognizes as key in dealing with the concept of otherness.
The works in the exhibition reveal how a person's perception is guided or influenced by the staging of an image. In Paula Modersohn-Becker's figure portraits, the individual is abstracted in order to achieve generalization, Francis Bacon depicts human ex¬tremes and man's vulnerability in the world. Zanele Muholi's impactful self-portraits play subtly with gender-specific conventions and, in the sense of a visual activism, aim to dissolve repressive narratives.

Zanele Muholi - Andy Warhol - Heinrich Maria Davringhausen - Josef Scharl - Max [Mopp] Oppenheimer - Auguste Herbin - Adolf Erbslöh - Paula Modersohn-Becker - August Sander - Nicole Aders - Conrad Felixmüller -
Curator Anna Storm -

Questioning the true age of photography, the exhibition will open with some of the first known Victorian images by William Henry Fox Talbot, positioning his experimentation with paper negatives as the very beginning of photography. It will also introduce a key selection of cyanotypes by one of the first women photographers, Anna Atkins (1799-1871), who created camera-less photograms of the algae specimens found along the south coast of England. Displayed publicly for the first time, these works highlight the ground-breaking accuracy of Atkins’ approach, and the remarkably contemporary appearance of her work which has inspired many artists and designers.

The exhibition will also foreground the artists who produced unprecedented photographic art in the twentieth century without artistic intention. The medium allowed for quick documentation of nature’s infinite specimens, making it an important tool for scientists and  botanists such as the German photographer and teacher Karl Blossfeldt (1865-1932) who captured close-up views of plant specimens in order to study and share an understanding of nature’s ‘architecture’. A selection of Blossfeldt’s ‘study aids’ will be displayed alongside work by the proud gardener Charles Jones, who used a glass plate camera to keep a meticulously illustrated record of his finest crops. Seen together for the first time, the two artists will be examined for their pragmatic approach that set them apart from the romanticised style of their time.

Nobuyoshi Araki - Anna Atkins - Alois Auer - Sir Cecil Beaton - Karl Blossfeldt - Adolphe Braun - Jan Brueghel I - Mat Collishaw - Imogen Cunningham - Roger Fenton - Adam Fuss - Ori Gersht - Cecilia Glaisher - Joy Gregory - William Henry Fox-Talbot - John Frederick Herschel - Gyula Holics - Jan van Huysum - Henry Irving - Charles Jones - Sarah Jones - André Kertész - Nick Knight - Lou Landauer - Richard Learoyd - Pradip Malde - Robert Mapplethorpe - John Moffat - Sarah Moon - James Mudd - Kazumasa Ogawa - [Enami Nobukuni] T. Enami - Albert G. Richards - Charles T. Scowen - [Maurice Scheltens & Liesbeth Abbenes] Scheltens & Abbenes - Helen Sear - Edward Steichen - Josef Sudek - Lorenzo Vitturi - Edward Weston - Walter Bentley Woodbury -
Curator Alexander Moore -

The gallery is pleased to present the first solo exhibition in Canada and second in North America of work by the famed German photographer, Claudia Fährenkemper (b. Castrop-Rauxel, Germany, 1959).

For more than thirty years, Fährenkemper has used photography to explore the strange beauty of man-made or natural objects by isolating them in some way from their environment. She studied under Bernd and Hilla Becher at the prestigious Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 1989 until 1995 and has since produced series in landscape, machinery, photomicroscopy, and most recently, formal portraits of 15th to 19th Century suits of armour.

This exhibition offers a survey of her practice that displays her talents in many genres. Illustrating her central thesis of using photography to transform reality and produce photographic images that visualize phenomena to enable comparative vision, Fährenkemper invites the observer to compare the information conveyed by her photographs with their own visible or remembered reality.

Claudia Fährenkemper -

Art production out of Eastern Europe had its moment after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when Western audiences flocked to Prague and other gateway points of the former Soviet Empire, hoping to experience the world behind the Iron Curtain before its inevitable adaption to the prevailing political system. Art from the region was shown widely at international exhibitions, providing a breath of fresh air while being displayed as newly discovered and captured trophies.
 
Now, thirty years later, contemporary art practices originating in the former East are gaining new confidence and empowerment. Middle European Mysticism proposes a comparison between the work of selected Slovak and Czech artists from different generations, with a focus on the element of mysticism permeating these artists’ works, in media ranging from painting and drawing to photography, sculpture and video.

Juraj Bartusz - Jiří David - Viktoria Langer - Štefan Papčo - Jitka Válová -

.informality is proud to present The Curious Eye Never Runs Dry by Paris based, Australian artist, Anthony White. The artist’s first solo show in the UK. The exhibition comprises recent work reviewing ideas about civil disobedience and its correlation to contemporary late capitalism. In the exhibition, Anthony White revisits themes of involuntary detention, injustice, migration, and reflects upon the effects of a Western capitalist civilisation in our modern environment.

In his latest work White combines important forms of analogue communication including posters of advertising and musical acts from the Paris metro. Drawing from the urban cultural history of Paris, the artist uses these reversed metro 'affiches' to build the image, tearing, re-cropping and utilising painterly interventions acting as a form of dissent.

The Curious Eye Never Runs Dry utilises materials tagged and altered by anonymous authors which symbolising collectivity in the community and highlights the increased need for collective types of communication, reinforcing the fact that we are interdependent upon one another.

Anthony White -

'Es geht mir immer um Transparenz und Schichtung, d.h. um den Raum. Meine Arbeiten sind Raumarbeiten'.
Der bekannte Bonner Künstler, 1955 geboren, ist mit seinem Werk in vielen Museen des In-und Auslands vertreten. So auch - was unsere Region betrifft - im Museum Pfalzgalerie Kaiserslautern, der Kunsthalle Mannheim, dem Wilhelm-Hack-Museum Ludwigshafen, dem Saarlandmuseum Saarbrücken.

Am Samstag, 1.9. kommt Werner Haypeter zur Eröffnung seiner Ausstellung um 18 Uhr in die Galerie Wack.
Dort ist der aktuelle Stand seines Schaffens zu sehen in Form von neuen Papierarbeiten und Objekten. Auch seine Vorliebe für Werkstoffe unsrer Zeit aus dem industriellen Bereich - etwa Kunststoffe wie Epoxidharz oder PVC - wird deutlich.

Am Eröffnungsabend spricht Michael Hübl (Karlsruhe) zur Einführung.

Werner Haypeter -

The installation 'Birdcage 2017' takes us back to the notion of habitable architecture, but with the focus on recreating an environment of confinement. With her house/cage, Choi invites the spectators to experience the feeling of finding themselves in a small and suffocating space. To complete the effect, this house allows us to see in between its slits, only partially covering what is happening on both sides, so that the people inside can see those who remain outside and vice versa.

Extreme loneliness and impersonal communications of contemporary life find their metaphorical version in this piece. Choi´s fragile construction of strings is a type of perversion of space, of society and of communication. The metaphor of the cage, more than reminding us of the cruelty of capturing a bird for our viewing pleasure, mocks human beings that shut themselves away from everyone else. It is a metaphor of our reality.
Text by Gonzalo Ortega, curator, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey

On occasion of Luminale 2018 (Frankfurt am Main)

Jeongmoon Choi -

The artist, born 1945 in The Hague, is present throughout the Netherlands with breathtaking large scale sculpture.

The exhibition shows work of different periods and provides an impressive insight into the artist's work.
His collages as well as his sculptures are full of tension and vitality. It is a dialogue between movement and rest, weight and lightness, volume and space. The playfully arranged constructive elements don't seem to follow a precise plan. The color of the surface is steel or bronze of the original material but sometimes as well colorful and bright.

Lon Pennock -

This year’s 13th International Painting Symposium 'Mark Rothko 2017' taking place in Daugavpils, Latvia, was attended by 10 artists from 10 different countries of the world. From 98 artists’ applications, this year’s participants of the symposium were chosen by a competent international jury.
This unique structured residency at the Mark Rothko Art Centre lets artists participate in a transcultural environment to critically engage with ideas central to the Abstract Expressionist visual arts practice. The symposium provides a space to explore and debate the role and purposes of contemporary art. Participants of the exhibition: Edda Jachens (Germany), Graham Fletcher (New Zealand), Anthony White (Australia / France), Katarina Balunova (Slovakia), Evrim Özeskici (Turkey), Bernier Carol (Canada), Teona Chanishvili (Georgia), Erling Stuart Rohde (Norway), Ramūnas Čeponis (Lithuania), Madara Neikena (Latvia).

Anthony White's work considers collision points, shifts and ruptures at the site of geopolitical and cultural boundaries, particularly in relation to global immigration crises; echoing Edward Said's identification of 'the inextricable links' between Modernism, war and immigration. White's works are often characterized by an awareness of surface and a preoccupation with physicality and the found object.
A dominant area of research in his work has been concerned with the phenomenon of Empires: How do empires construct narratives to promote and propagate ideology?

Edda Jachens - Graham Fletcher - Anthony White - Katarina Balunova - Evrim Özeskici - Bernier Carol - Teona Chanishvili - Erling Stuart Rohde - Ramūnas Čeponis - Madara Neikena -

This exhibition presents a vital yet lesser-known history of abstract painting in New England by showcasing the work of women painters with strong connections to the region. Despite their relative exclusion from mainstream and male-dominated conversations on postwar abstraction, these artists have made significant contributions to the field. Spanning from the 1950s to the present, the works on view in the exhibition expand traditions of abstract painting and testify to the artists’ unwavering productivity and creative innovation.

Drawn primarily from deCordova’s permanent collection, this survey explores diverse techniques, processes, and concepts. The exhibition and interpretation also emphasizes the artists’ contributions, connections, and reception within New England. Expanding Abstraction reveals the complexities of painting in the region and lays the foundation for a more inclusive understanding of abstraction through the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Natalie Alper - Adria Arch - Dorothy Arnold - Melinda Ashley - Kristin Baker - Cynthia Bloom - Maggi Brown - Helen Frankenthaler - Sharon Friedman - Jacqueline Gourevitch - Beverly Hallam - Fannie Hillsmith - Sherrill Edwards Hunnibell - Reese Inman - Elizabeth Saalfield Ives - Yeffe Kimball - Jeanne Leger - Alice Trumbull Mason - Maud Morgan - Anne Neely - Roberta Paul - Meg Brown Payson - Irene Rice Pereira - Ann Pibal - Katherine Porter - Terri Priest - Elizabeth Rosenblum - JoAnn Rothschild - Jo Sandman - May Stevens - Barbara Takenaga - Lois Tarlow - Irene Valincius - Barbara Weldon - Lucy White - Maxine Yalovitz-Blankenship - Sandi Slone -
Curator Jennifer Gross - Sarah Montross -