Wechselschicht_Weltdepot | 1. Schicht | Rainer Barzen (Cologne)

About

We are extremely pleased to present the positions of Rainer Barzen and Ingrid Roscheck (both Cologne) within the project Wechselschicht_Weltdepot at Das Esszimmer. In curatorial collaboration with the cultural historian Silke Dombrowsky (Bonn), DAS ESSZIMMER shows for the first time two interlocking individual exhibitions.

Therefore Rainer Barzen and Ingrid Roscheck go on rotating shifts. Both understand the reality of life and the gathering of their own world as a cultural exchange process. In different approaches they change the context of an object and move it to other context-layers. The ambiguity and simultaneity of individual and collective identity are by that means made experienceable as profound aspects of contemporary art.

With the opening of Rainer Barzen’s solo show on April 8, 2016 a webcam in the art depot of the artists in Cologne Weidenpesch will go online. The live stream will be present throughout the whole exhibition project – on the homepage and in the front room of DAs ESSZIMMER. By this means the dual reality in the work of Barzen and Roscheck unfolds as another layer of perception. The whole world can take neighborly part in the exhibition project.

Rainer Barzen it amazed to see "what happens when things are extracted from the circuit of the familiar and are stopped." The thus isolated, segmented and usually discolored objects, situations and fragments find in this manner, so Barzen, "a break", the image serves as a "thing-convalescent home “ (dt.: Ding-Genesungsheim), in which the selected motifs may recover.

Rainer Barzen sees itself as "an artist who is not avoiding sedimentation". In this sense his oeuvre can be understood as the deposition of particles under the influence of weight or centrifugal forces. His work chapters form an artistic Depot and are at the same time "works on open ends, stirring new thinking, that has not be thought through".

At DAS ESSZIMMER Barzen, since 2005 professor for experimental crafting at the University of Cologne, bares this approach: His work s/w LD (2012-15 pastel a / handmade paper 64 x 76.5 cm) is a key work whose rigor comes from "inserting further things" from different chapters of his oeuvre that help joining it together narratively.

With his current work series SHOTS, Barzen shows for the first time his "reflex on the thing Smartphone". In picturesque appropriation he references those patches of color that appear for a brief moment on digital devices, after a photo-search is send into the electronic space. That moments of color averages, Barzen gives – as so typical for his work – a break. The format of the smartphone is left, the selected sections of the visible open up new and ambiguous insights with an open meaningfulness. Not least the curiosity for the original search request of the artist opens up new spaces in the world depot of the viewers.

Rainer Barzen increases with complex, artistic questions awareness for the fluent exchange of individual and collective experienced worlds.

The exhibition was made possible by:
Stiftung Kunst der Sparkasse in Bonn