Montag, 6. September 2010

I curated my first exhibition: "über kitsch - german contemporaries"


My group show "über kitsch - german contemporaries" took place at the Vyner Studio in East London, 2nd til 4th September 2010.

See website for more Info: http://uberkitschlondon.blogspot.com/ 

7 young artists from fine art academies in Nürnberg and München combine living tradition with a playful freudian irony to create a happy but broken nostalgia.

The title of the exhibition "über Kitsch" contends two German words used as foreign words in the English language as well. English vogue term "über" has in German a second meaning apart from the smilar in English hyper, extreme, more" which is "about". "Kitsch" is one of the ten most difficult foreign words in the English language.

"über kitsch - german contemporaries" takes the oldfashioned thought of a specific art style being connected to a certain nationality as ironic as kitsch himself - a stereotype, a cliché one can use to show greyscales.

We turn the colour saturation up and don't think of kitsch as opposite to avantgarde (which is a military term anyway) like Adorno or Greenberg rather go with Kundera:"Whenever a single political movement corners power we find ourselves in the realm of totalitarian kitsch."
The exhibition presents colourful camp oil paintings, animation videos and quirky photographies that let your living room die a pink retro death.

Sigmund Freud was from austria, which feels much closer to artists from cozy southern German cities like Munich or Nuremberg than cold Prussian north. Fuck Berlin, Cologne or Leibzig, here comes the south.

Kitsch ‘n‘ sink rules!

Less is a bore.

too much is not enough.