Make It Your Own Story

About

“Make it your own story” – the title of the exhibition is a call for participation. A work of art can only unfold its power and affect the viewer as long as it is perceived, thus becoming part of one’s own story.

Susanne Roewer and Hubertus Hamm are highly interested in materials and their distinctive properties. Deliberate yet playful, they consciously shape the different materials, putting the latter’s specific traits at the service of their art.

Susanne Roewer combines the fragile material of glass – magically formed in fire – with stone, one of the earliest artistic materials. Using hammer and chisel, the artist shapes the hard stone, created by the earth over many thousands of years. The deliberate physical force applied by the artist elicits form from matter. Through the combination with glass, which is created by mixing, heating, melting, shaping and then carefully cooling different substances, two conflicting materials collide, forming a fragile new entity. According to the artist, her works owe as much to the history of mankind as to small everyday stories. Immaterial ideas are given contemporary material expression.

Hubertus Hamm also utilizes the physical power of the body. For his series “Molded Mirrors”, he deforms thin, rectangular steel plates. Three-dimensional objects emerge, protruding from the surface into space. The heavy steel, which the artist brings into the desired form with tremendous physical force, is initially given a coloured reflective surface by means of an alchemical refinement process. Hubertus Hamm is a trained photographer who already ventured into unexplored artistic territory with his "Utility Photographs", commissioned by major editorial departments, advertising agencies and global companies. In “Molded Mirrors” he tears down the boundaries between the two-dimensional photo of an object and the three-dimensional photographic object. As an inversion of what photography actually is, these works constitute a liquefied, permanently changing reflection of the world that cannot be fixed. They show fleeting, perpetually new images, different for everyone and only visible when the work is looked at, thus becoming part of one’s own story.

Susanne Roewer (born 1971 in Bad Schlema, Germany) studied material science before earning a degree in fine art from the Hochschule der Künste Berlin. Together with Gregor Hildebrand and Marc Pätzold, she founded the G7 Berlin Network Gallery, featuring an exhibition programme developed by artists for artists, before collaborating with various collectors and sponsorship programmes in Switzerland. Her works have been exhibited all over the world at numerous art associations and institutions, such as the Craft and Folk Museum in Los Angeles (USA), the Fort Wayne Museum of Art (USA) as well as the Kunstverein Gütersloh (D). Her works are featured in national and international collections, such as the Farhang Foundation Collection at the Craft and Folk Art Museum San Francisco (USA). Susanne Roewer is actively involved in the International Conference on Contemporary Cast Iron Art.

Hubertus Hamm (born 1951 in Werdohl, Germany) graduated from the Bavarian State School of Photography in Munich. From 1975 onwards, he worked in applied, editorial and conceptual photography while exhibiting in important venues and institutions, such as Munich’s Villa Stuck or the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg (both Germany). Since 2012, he has been concentrating on his own art and exhibition projects, guided by the question: what is object, subject, time and space? His works have been exhibited at the Villa Stuck in Munich (D), the Deichtorhallen, Hamburg (D), the Neue Sammlung of the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (D) and the Yuan Art Museum in Beijing (CN), among others. Temporary installations of his works have been shown at, among others, the National Theatre in Munich (D) and most recently at the Museum Rietberg in Zurich (CH).