An assemblage of 15 puppets, a flexible landscape of banners as well various sound modules form part of the new ‘Emblematic sculpture’ Formula:Congorama, which was created during Suse Weber’s stay in Belgium between 2008-2011. In an opera-like format, she formulates a counter-model to more old-fashioned social panoramas, by means such as miniaturizing the audience.

After it was first performed in the Troublyen Laboratorium in Antwerp in 2009, three further shows followed in Antwerp and Brussels. For its fifth performance, Suse Weber has now rearranged an image-and sound-composition specifically for the gallery space.

It is a further realization of her ‘Emblematic Sculptural’ concept. The Emblematic Sculpture – an assertion, with which the notion of sculpture is newly translated into an adjustable sign- and behavioral system.

In 2006 Suse Weber created the first German-Turkish opera at the Akademie der Künste, Berlin. Since 2008 she has been developing, through performances and exhibitions, the following complex of works: Formula:Societies, Formula:Congorama and Formula:Marionett. Amongst others she has performed or shown at the Martha Herford Museum (2009), the WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels (2009), the Kunsthalle Lingen (2011), as well as in the group show Made in Germany at the Sprengel Museum, Hanover (2012) and in the jubilee exhibition, Ihre Geschichte(n) at the Bonner Kunstverein (2013).

Suse Weber -

Blum & Poe is very pleased to present our first solo exhibition with Los Angeles based artist Jim Shaw. Spanning three decades and covering the entire gallery, Shaw's fantastical, humorous, and psychologically laden explorations into esoteric, as well as popular, cultural phenomena coalesce to render a tale of Biblical proportion. Combing historic texts, artworks, comic books, and his dreams, Shaw's flood of imagery is an essential tool in conveying his imagined histories and fables. Rivers, houses, and hair are but a few motifs repeated throughout the exhibition. Seemingly disparate, they mnemonically serve each other in depicting over-arching themes of fallen heroes, collapsed economies, concepts of sin, and general doomsday destruction. 
 
No human transition is more extreme than life to death, which Shaw makes prominent in his repetition of ominous water motifs. Enveloping the exhibition space at eighteen by forty feet is the work Mississippi River Mural, an old theater backdrop layered with a frieze of figures painted in illustrative comic style in battle-ready stances. This commanding work is unnervingly static, as if the figures have waited an eternity for their stage queue to the afterlife. Shaw's obsession with the cycle of life and death serves as a basis for the other works in the show.

Jim Shaw -

Although figurative her forms have an amorphous quality, a deliberate lack of definition that is emphasized by her choice of materials and the sand casting method that she often employs. They have an anonymous quality, magical alchemical creations that she infuses with life, humanises and sets forth to take their place in the landscape. We, the viewers, respond to this in a way that we cannot with two dimensional works. We should and do engage in a private discourse with such figurative sculpture. Steinunn approves and indeed encourages this interaction. A personal, often tactile, response perhaps serves to confirm to the artist that her creation is vitally charged and not lifeless.
Peter Osborne, London

Steinunn has worked on figurative sculpture from the beginning of her career but she studied in the UK and Italy. That placed her works apart from her contemporaries and colleagues in the Icelandic visual art scene. Her figures are androgynous symbols of humanity. Her works are organic and explosive in their texture and formation.  She uses many different materials to serve the ideas of her works. Steinunn's works have from the start been strongly linked to Icelandic nature. Man's conversation with nature, his surroundings and society are an integral part of her art.
Steinum has had numerous solo shows worldwide as well as participated in a number of group exhibitions and art fairs. Steinunn's work is in many important private and public collections worldwide.

Steinunn Thórarinsdóttir -

This November Ambika P3 presents A Sense of Place, a major exhibition of the work of British artist Victor Burgin. Five recent digital projection pieces are complemented by earlier photo-text works exploring relations between place, memory and image.

Victor Burgin first came to prominence in the late 1960s as an originator of Conceptual Art, when his work appeared in such key exhibitions as "When Attitudes Become Form" (1969) and "Information" (1970). He has since remained one of the most consistently influential artists and art theorists of his generation.

Victor Burgin´s new work for the Ambika P3 exhibition, "Mirror Lake", is a response to the Seth Peterson Cottage, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and built in 1958 in what is now Mirror Lake State Park, Wisconsin. This work shows concurrently with his other new work, "Parzival", commissioned by the Geneva Wagner Festival and installed at the Musée d’Art Modern et Contemporain, Geneva.

Victor Burgin -
Curator David Campany - Michael Mazière -

Un serrato dialogo intergenerazionale, carico di filiazioni, equivalenze e isomorfismi. 
Una corrispondenza biunivoca, un gioco alla pari, un diagramma di transiti e permanenze. Incanalandosi in questi binari, la doppia personale di Urs Lüthi (1947, Kriens, Svizzera) e Agne Raceviciute (1988, Klaipeda, Lituania), rintraccia la storia discreta di un rapporto di stima reciproca tra un’artista emergente di origini lituane e una delle figure tutelari del suo lavoro.
Legati da un tessuto di corrispondenze, Lüthi e Raceviciute condividono un medesimo approccio alla fotografia in bianco e nero, prolungata spesso in installazione e scultura, insieme a una fascinazione per l’universo del vestiario e per le figure complementari della maschera e del velo. Una zona di ricerca comune, declinata trasversalmente nel tempo e nella geografia artistica del contemporaneo, in cui l’esplorazione ambivalente dei meccanismi di mimetismo e trasformismo identitario inverte di segno la tradizionale simbolica del ritratto e dell’autoritratto e la ristruttura come approccio ambivalente alla natura morta umana.

Urs Lüthi - Agne Raceviciute -
Curator Simone Frangi -

Mit der Retrospektive „Werner Büttner. Gemeine Wahrheiten“ zeigt die Weserburg | Museum für moderne Kunst die bislang umfangreichste Schau mit Werken des Hamburger Künstlers Werner Büttner. Zusammen mit Martin Kippenberger und Albert Oehlen prägte er seit den frühen 1980er-Jahren nachhaltig die europäische Kunstszene. Bilder, Zeichnungen, Collagen und Skulpturen zeugen von Büttners Einfallsreichtum, Ironie aber auch beißendem Spott gegenüber den gesellschaftlichen Realitäten. Die Ausstellung hebt die Bedeutung von Werner Büttner in Bezug auf die Entwicklung der deutschen Malerei im ausgehenden 20. Jahrhundert hervor, die er maßgeblich mit beeinflusst hat und stellt ihn als eine ihrer zentralen Figuren und Vordenker dar.
Die rund 300 Bilder, Zeichnungen, Collagen und Skulpturen der Ausstellung geben einen umfassenden Einblick in die dekonstruierende Arbeitsweise Büttners und lassen seine Kreativität und Eigenständigkeit hervor treten.

Zur Ausstellung erscheint im Verlag Hatje Cantz eine Publikation, hg. v. Peter Weibel und Andreas Beitin

Werner Büttner -
Curator Peter Weibel - Andreas F. Beitin -

The Campredon Centre d'Art in Isle sur la Sorge, near Avignon, France, hosts the exhibition "From Art to Craft. Palm Springs, 1960" by the photographer Robert Doisneau, presenting hundreds of black and white images, many of them not shown before in public, together with documents, magazines and personal objects of the author selected by his daughter and the responsibles of his workshop. Besides these images, the exhibition shows additional 50 color photographs from the book "Palm Springs", taken by Doisneau in 1960 commissioned by Fortune magazine and that still had not been exposed. 

This extensive selection, further enriched with personal documents and testimonies lovingly collected by the photographer’s daughter, provides us with an updated critical rereading, showing us how the apparent spontaneous beauty of his images was, in actual fact, the fruit of considerable work. Robert Doisneau is one of the most important representatives of humanistic photography. For many years he has been looked upon as the minstrel of picturesque Paris, with a charming eye and a unique sense of the unexpected visual anecdote. As a result he has been championed as a poet of the "pure" moment. However, Doisneau's oeuvre is much deeper and complex than that reputation suggests. 

The exhibition is organized in collaboration with diChroma photography, Madrid.
Catalogue " Palm Springs, 1960" by Flammarion, catalogue From Craft to Art by Steidl&Partner.

Robert Doisneau -

A ghost metro train, which has already been all around Europe, appears in Berlin. 
It ignores physics, gaps between buildings, space and time. Based on a light phenomenon, “the light Hole”, the ghost metro train turns into a travelling myth, which constitutes itself upon its loose artifacts, collected on the way. The train becomes an artifact itself, as it could appear at any public space―unpredictably, unable to be tracked by route or starting point. 
HR-Stamenov suggests a light spectacle, as a train literally “appears” inside a building, leaving passers-by unknowing of what they have just seen. The immediate attention, which the media installation produces, serves as an illustration of a rather nostalgic gesture, the fascination of observing a train passing by at times when this occurrence is rare sight. Similarly, it illustrates a spectacle in public space, as it transforms a three-dimensional object―such as a train―into a screen-based visual phenomenon. It is the size, the picture and the sound of a real train; it be-comes a screen, a motion picture, a blinking advertising sign. Located in the center of Berlin―at the LEAP venue on Karl-Liebknecht-Straße at Alexanderplatz―the Ghost Train is also in con¬stant reference to its original symbolic context. Every couple of minutes a train passes through or stops at the central city station (Alexanderplatz) which the glass-façade of the installation points at.

HR-Stamenov -
Curator Sandra Moskova -

From its beginnings in 1975 to the present, the work of Silvie & Chérif Defraoui has engendered a historical and artistic body that forms an integral element of what we call, with a generalizing term, the art of the 1970s.
Their multifaceted oeuvre from this period presents unexpected artistic forms, often involving materials and themes, objects and techniques, that were unheard of at the time. The entire series, which brought the Defraouis international renown, is collectively titled Archives du Futur. All pieces relate to this key concept, which synthesizes or questions a totality of space and time.
With Rooms (Lieux de mémoire VI) (1976–2003), Galerie Susanna Kulli now revisits a set of works Silvie & Chérif Defraoui created together in the 1970s.
In these large-format photographs, a superimposition takes place on the level of image, architecture, and writing: “The order of architecture determines the narrative, and the projections that build up in the place restore to it a diaphanous and contradictory memory. In the painted words, space fades into the photographic image,” the artists write.

Silvie Defraoui -

Am Anfang des Prozesses, dessen Ergebnis die Arbeiten dieser Ausstellung bilden, stand eine Schatzsuche wie aus Kindheitstagen: Der emeritierte Kunstprofessor Wolfgang Nestler sammelte – während eines Sommerurlaubs in diesem Jahr auf Sardinien – Baumblätter, er presste sie in Bücher, er zeichnete sie. Diese Reduktion auf Einfachheit ließ Inspiration entstehen, eine Entfaltung in Dimensionen.

Nestler experimentierte mit der Idee, das Blatt eines Baumes, gefunden in der Natur und transformiert durch die Zeichnung, erkannt in seiner Besonderheit und zugleich als Spiegel des Ganzen, durch ein Drehen um die Mittelachse zum Körper werden zu lassen. Als Material wählte Nestler Holz und schrieb damit ein neues Kapitel in seiner Künstler-biographie, die doch dominiert ist von der Auseinandersetzung mit Eisen und Stahl. Vom Baumblatt als einziger Vorlage hat sich Nestler dabei schon distanziert und lässt auch Gegenstände des Alltags zum Modell werden.

Wolfgang Nestler war Meisterschüler von Erwin Heerich an der Staatlichen Kunstakademie Düsseldorf und 18 Jahre Professor für Plastik und Bildhauerei an der Hochschule der Bildenden Künste Saar, Saarbrücken, er wurde vielfach ausgezeichnet, seine Arbeiten sind in zahlreichen bedeutenden Sammlungen wie der Natonalgalerie Berlin, dem Kunstmuseum Bonn, dem Kunstmuseum Düsseldorf oder der Kunsthalle Mannheim sowie im öffentlichen Raum.
Text Claudia Küpper (Auszug)

Wolfgang Nestler -