Exhibition

Never Let Me Go

2 Sep 2022 – 2 Oct 2022

Regular hours

Monday
Closed
Tuesday
10:00 – 18:00
Wednesday
10:00 – 18:00
Thursday
10:00 – 18:00
Friday
10:00 – 18:00
Saturday
10:00 – 18:00
Sunday
10:00 – 18:00

Free admission

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Herzbergstrasse 55

Berlin
Berlin, Germany

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The exhibition's title, Never Let Me Go, comes from Kazuo Ishiguro's 2005 novel set in an alternate world and is chosen because the themes of the novel corelates to both artist practices.

About

Never Let Me Go

"I was thinking about the rubbish, the flapping plastic in the branches, the shore-line of odd stuff caught along the fencing, and I half-closed my eyes and imagined this was the spot where everything I'd ever lost since my childhood had washed up, and I was now standing here in front of it”

The exhibition's title, Never Let Me Go, comes from Kazuo Ishiguro's 2005 novel set in an alternate world, the main characters are three friends who were born with the sole purpose of being organ donors and therefore know from an early age that they will not live to over 35. Despite its sci-fi, dystopian premise, the book does not discuss science or politics, it is an account of the lives of three friends, from childhood to what in this world describes as their "end" what we actually know means death.

One of the main ideas embedded in the novel's title. In the story of the novel, Never Let Me Go refers to the name of a song that the narrator, Kathy, loved as a child. The song came to her on a cassette tape donated to the boarding school where she grew up. Due to a lack of personal belongings at the school, the cassette tape along with the song became a treasure. Slowly, as Kathy matured, the meaning of the song also changed. As a child it represented keeping your favorite things safe so that no one could take them away from you, but eventually it comes to represent the desire to hold on to things as long as possible, knowing that everything will eventually disappear. This impermanence of things and experiences, including her innocence and youth, her favorite things, and eventually all the people she loved, is perhaps the central theme of the novel. The tape itself, which in the novel is lost, but is eventually found again as a copy, has additional significance for painting. Music preserved on tape is in many ways parallel to how materials are bound to surfaces, preserving the character of paint and documenting a living, moving, active process. Painting, like a cassette tape, has the ability to retain and make a recording of an experience, of the ineffable and the ephemeral, for as long as possible.

Marie Birkedal's process is built around moments where, due to its physical properties, paint can live and move across the canvas, movement, gravity, and drying time imply a state that is not permanent, but which the artist nevertheless wishes to maintain. In Birkedal's paintings we don't just see form and colour, we also see paint poured on one side of the canvas slowly moving under gravity to the other side. By watching the process, we see the history of the painting and through the history we can imagine the artist's experiences, motivations and possibly even the back story.

Ian Jehle's work focuses on the treated plywood surface that dictates how and where the paint is applied, a thousand small chips locked together that simultaneously move in all directions, a universe unto itself; that asks to be understood before it inevitably falls apart. It is a puzzle that requires specific steps to solve. When you imagine each step as a beat, the painting itself becomes a recording of how the puzzle goes from unsolved to a little more solved. In Jehle's paintings, the process reveals itself in the algorithm used to color in the shapes, which is based on a long-standing, never-solved math problem. The puzzle is rarely, if ever, solved, not because of a flaw in the algorithm, but rather because the act of trying to solve the problem is ultimately more meaningful than the solution. This separation between the meaning of the content of the painting and the experience of the content of the painting and the experience of the process is something that both artists emphasize and describe.

Never Let Me Go is also chosen by the artists because the novel is also a statement of why artists produce art. Early in the novel, the book's narrator, Kathy, fondly recounts the artwork she and her classmates made as children at their special boarding school. The students submitted their art to what they called the "gallery" and therefore believed that what they created had great significance to the outside world. As they got older, the students traded artwork as a way to remember each other and their shared childhood. And as adults, long after it was clear that the world had little interest in what they produced, the art became a way for the former students, now organ donors, to understand themselves and as a record of their short lives.

As artists in the middle of their careers, both have experienced a progression in relation to work. In her early practice, M.B worked with drawing that dealt with social, political, and psychological boundaries set for women, whereas in the last decades she has worked with painting not to illustrate but to pain on paintings terms. I.J spent many years producing large unauthorized portraits of people in the art world, examining the often-incongruous public identities created and co-created. The exhibition shows a section of the journey the two artists have been on until they returned to roots in painting.

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Exhibiting artistsToggle

Marie Birkedal

Marie Birkedal

Ian Jehle

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