Exhibition

Where the Waters Run Together

16 Sep 2022 – 16 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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Herzbergstrasse55

Berlin
Berlin, Germany

Event map

This is a studio-viewing with the artists Ian Jehle and Marie Birkedal who show a series of paintings that is an outlier of the duo-show “Never Let Me Go” in a more intimate setting. An exhibition about painting, about Painter’s Paintings and about the two artists practices.

About

Where the Waters Run Together

Marie Birkedal’s work comes about in a hyper-focused wordless state in a balance of planned process and spontaneity. She thins her paints to the point where the binder breaks and only the pigment remains, which makes the paint so liquid it gives the painting a degree of autonomy. The paint develops through evaporation leaving dust-like traces, making the paintings seem evoked rather than made. The luminous washes and powerful brushstrokes radiate an ephemeral presence and the paintings appear to be breathing beings. Her works encapsulate time as a material equally to paint and canvas. The works are not alla prima; the translucent tactile thinned color requires that each layer is completely dry until the next. There are long periods of emptiness where seemingly nothing happens but everything happens. Just as she does not view negative space as a non-space in her works, she does not view waiting as non-time.

Ian Jehle's work focuses on the plywood surface that dictates how and where the paint is applied, a thousand small chips locked together, simultaneously moving 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 based on a never-solved math problem. The puzzle is rarely, if ever, solved, not because of a flaw in the algorithm, more because the act of trying to solve the problem is ultimately more meaningful than the solution.

Whereas Birkedal empties her mind of words and ideas and enter a wordless focus and inspiration before painting; Jehle's mode of working is feeding his mind with potentially unsolvable mathematical and philosophical problems, and algorithms of color, he seeks to make the riddle more and more complex as fuel, while Birkedal seeks silence and clarity. However, in these two apparently contradicting modalities of working they meet: where they on a linear line is on each opposing end of the line, their processes are so radical that the line becomes a circle where their stances meet. In that both artists are asking questions not giving answers and in their shared acceptance of never quite solving the puzzle but staying within the journey.

What to expect? Toggle

CuratorsToggle

Marie Birkedal

Marie Birkedal

Ian Jehle

Exhibiting artistsToggle

Marie Birkedal

Marie Birkedal

Ian Jehle

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