Peter Friedl. Teotro Popular

About

On occasion of the 2023 Berlin Art Week, we present our first solo exhibition with Peter Friedl. The three-time documenta participant’s presentation focuses on sculptural works of the past several years, including a new project, and illustrates why this challenging artist has been so important to contemporary art and thinking for over three decades.

Peter Friedl is a historian. Historians are wont to tell (hi)stories, and that, we might say, is what Friedl does, though he doesn’t tell them in linear fashion and certainly not through to the end. Rather, Friedl creates spectacles—in Greek, theatra—: scenes where there is something to see. Situations in which something happens, or perhaps put more precisely: is inclined to happen. We stand in sculptural settings, contemplating plastic figures or their outer shells, which manifestly have a lot to say and relate—we believe, we can see they’re capable of it. Just as you believe, you see an actor will deliver who leaves her dressing room in full costume to go onstage, and before the play even begins you can see it coming, before you even know what she’ll play.

In fact, the cast Friedl arrays at KOW consists of famous as well as ostensibly marginal protagonists who in their day played their parts in events we know now more, now less about, events that are considered more or less momentous and that Friedl now makes it impossible for us to avoid (as long as we keep to the point, which is to say: keep looking). Who are they? What did they do? What was done to them, which violence was inflicted on them? What happened? What do we see coming? How do they relate to one another and to us? And what is it we don’t know about all this?

What Friedl shows us are open-ended narrative models and sometimes also models of history that stand as alternatives to, athwart or against, the narratives we typically have down pat—or that were drilled into us—and that the artist now breaks up.

He does that not by rounding out counter-narratives but, and this is remarkable, by releasing his historical material into an aesthetic autonomy that makes it available for a reconsideration of realities in which a story can be told (in this way) (or in that).