Moonlight at Noon

About

The basis for the exhibition „Moonlight at Noon“ featuring artworks by Orion Shima and Martin Stommel was established in 2019, when we came into contact via the internet with the Albanian gallerist Lauresha Basha of Gallery 70 in Tirana, Albania. We liked each other from the outset and furthermore discovered common grounds regarding the alignment of our galleries, spawning the idea for a more extensive exchange. In June of that year we relayed an invitation from Lauresha Basha to Martin Stommel for a solo exhibition at Gallery 70 in Tirana.
For this exhibition Martin Stommel travelled in October 2019 to Tirana and was not only delighted by the candour and cordiality of his hostess but also by the kindness of the general public. Among other artists he was introduced to Orion Shima, who is also engaged as a professor at the University of Arts in the Albanian capital and who expressed his immediate trust by spontaneously letting Stommel give a lecture to his curious students.
Apart from our fundamental enthusiasm for the work of Orion Shima we noticed the mutual sympathy of the artists as well as the reciprocal understanding for their artistic works. This very naturally authored the concept of a common exhibition of the two artists in our premises in Berlin.
A common thread of both artists is the genre of figurative painting. Style and content of Stommel and Shima are despite all differences connected by the archetypes underlying the subjects, respectively the pursuit of them.
With the exhibition we want to bring the works of Martin Stommel and Orion Shima—considering their European but highly different cultural backgrounds—into dialogue. The formal distinctions are being clarified by the juxtaposition, while the masterful artworks as a whole of both artists embody an independent, cross-cultural artistic medium, which connects very fundamentally.

text by Matthias Bergemann