Dear ladies and gentlemen, dear friends of the arts,
on the occasion of the opening of the new department for graphic arts, the Direktorenhaus Berlin has invited Wolf & Galentz to present parts of their collection in the exhibition Radical Craft 2.
The Direktorenhaus, Museum for Art Crafts Design, is dedicated to the presentation of design experiments, new materials, ideas for the future, and design art, with a focus on craft techniques.
With this concept in mind, the selection criteria for the works curated by Wolf & Galentz were technical precision of the works or their speculative future oriented contents.
Artists
Jovan Balov, Gunther Baumgart, Jürgen Franke, Gisa Hausmann, Philipp Mager, Jürgen Peters and Kata Unger
We would like to invite you to the opening on Thursday 29 October 2020 at 7 pm.
Direktorenhaus
Am Krögel 2, 10179 Berlin
T +49 (0)30 / 48 49 19 29
info@direktorenhaus.com
Exhibition
30.10.2020 – 28.03.2021
Opening hours
per appointment only (Tue – Fr 11 am – 5pm)
please call 030/4849 1929
Artwork: Jürgen Peters 1936-1997,
Interchange, 1980, silkscreen, 203/250, picture size 60 x 60 cm, (detail)
Dear Ladies and Gentlemen,
we cordially invite you to visit our next exhibition
The Rehfeldt’s – A Family of Artists from Pankow
Artists:
Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt, edition
Robert Rehfeldt, painting, collage, Mail art
René Rehfeldt, printmaking
and works of the sculptor Rolf Winkler
Opening: Sunday, September 13, 3–8 pm
Introduction to the exhibition: Joachim Pohl (in German language)
Due to the current situation we ask you to announce your visit by e-mail (mail@wolf-galentz.de).
Finissage: Sunday, October 25, 4–8pm
Exhibition: September 14 to October 25, 2020
The Rehfeldts – an artist family from Pankow
In the western part of Germany his name is probably known only to a few, and yet Robert Rehfeldt from Berlin-Pankow – the ‘Fanfare of Pankow’, as artist friend Wolf Vostell dubbed him – probably had the most extensive international contacts of all GDR artists: through Mail art. (Kunstforum, Vol. 115, 1991)
The new exhibition at Wolf & Galentz is dedicated to the Rehfeldt family – Robert Rehfeldt (1931–1993), Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt (b. 1932) and their son René (b. 1956). This is the first time ever that works by all three Rehfeldts are presented together.
Robert and Ruth are both especially known for their importance in Mail art; from about 1970 to 1990 – shortly after the fall of the Wall – they formed one of the hubs of the Mail art scene in the GDR and accordingly – due to the nature of Mail art – worldwide.
Initiated by the Fluxus movement in the 1960s, Mail art is an art form that subverts established institutions and measures of value in art distribution and is integrative and egalitarian in nature. The art lies more in the process of distribution, in sharing and communicating the works, in the network itself, than in the individual work: the network and exchange with other artists is central.
In the front room of the Wolf & Galentz Gallery, works by Robert Rehfeldt are shown: a large-format painting (3 x 2 m) of painting and collage, which deals with Mail art; a selection of Mail art and stamp paintings fills another wall, the third wall shows a medium-format assemblage and some smaller works.
Two of Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt’s rare paintings can be seen in the back room of the gallery, along with a selection of Typewritings, the art form for which the she became famous, which were also shown at documenta 14: pictures ‘painted’ on a typewriter, consisting of letters.
In the small room between his two parents, René Rehfeldt shows a selection of his graphic art.
The exhibition is supplemented by several sculptures by a friend of Robert Rehfeldt, the sculptor Rolf Winkler (1930–2001).
Dear Ladies and Gentlemen,
we cordially invite you to visit our new exhibition
Flowers – Approaches to a Contentious Motif.
Exhibition: May 30 to July 28, 2020
Opening: Fri, May 29, 2–10 pm, only on prior appointment
Closing event: Tuesday 28 from 5–10pm
Because of the current situation, we regret to not be able to have an opening with many guests all at the same time. To allow only the permitted number of visitors, please use the form on our website to announce your visit (available soon). You can also write us an e-mail or just give us a call.
You can find a digital tour of the flower exhibition on our German website.
Artists
Gallery
- Gisa Hausmann
- Marina Koldobskaya
- Mr. Ira Schneider
Cabinett
- Mariam Azlamazyan
- G. von Galentz
- Brigitta Friedrich
- Joseph Heeg
- Alexander Horn
- Thomas Kaemmerer
- Philipp Mager
- Oleg Neishtadt
- Jürgen Wittdorf
- and other artists from our collection
Flowers – Approaches to a Contentious Motif
‘It is unseemly for a contemporary artist to paint flowers,’ writes Marina Koldobskaya, one of the artists of the upcoming exhibition at Wolf & Galentz. Who paints flowers in spite of that, she continues, risks loosing their reputation as a serious artist.
This is because flowers are presumed to be decorative, and the decorative to be incompatible with contemporary art – such, at any rate, the discourse on contemporary art tells us, and also that art is supposed to be difficult, ugly, disrupted in some way or that it should concern itself with political issues.
Thus, Gisela Breitling writes in an article about Gisa Hausmann’s flower pictures (also in the exhibition): ‘nowadays, beauty in art is a much bigger challenge for the arts than everything we usually deem artistic provocation’.
Fortunately, contemporary art itself does not, other than the discourse, abide by this ban on flowers in the service of avoiding the beautiful, but it faces the challenge, otherwise the remarkable pictures in the exhibition wouldn’t exist and we couldn’t see them.
The three artist shown in the big main room of the gallery, Gisa Hausmann, Marina Koldobskaya and Ira Schneider, three very different positions, present a broad variety of possible approaches to flowers.
Drawings and prints reworked in watercolours by Berlin artist Gisa Hausmann (1942–2015) show hothouse flowers and other obviously non-native, but artfully bred flowers in realist detail and in a style that is reminiscent of Jugendstil.
Marina Koldobskaya (b. 1961) paints in acrylic on paper or canvas; in clear, simplified shapes her bold and expressive flowers grow alone, in small groups or even whole fields; flower beds, meadows, drug plantations, as she herself states. She lives and works in St. Petersburg, Russia.
Ira Schneider, born and raised in New York (b. 1939), video artist and one of the most important pioneers of video art in the sixties and seventies, photographs flowers, in his own small garden in Berlin Wedding among other places, with a concave mirror. The photos made thusly feature an interesting similarity to non-objective paintings, since the distortion engenders abstraction. He points out that ‘human beings are made up of 67 % water and 33 % flowers’. Ira Schneider continues to produce video works, a new one will be will be exhibited throughout the current exhibition.
In the gallery’s smaller room, the cabinet, several more artists are shown with one or two works each: Mariam Aslamazyan, Hermann Bachmann, Brigitta Friedrich, Klaus Fußmann, Archi Galentz, G. von Galentz, Joseph Heeg, Alexander Horn, Thomas Kaemmerer, Philipp Mager, Oleg Neishtadt, Nazeli Nikogosyan and Jürgen Wittdorf.
The pictures are small and of middle size, they are etchings, oil or gouache paintings and paintings made by pouring paint over the canvas. The exhibition will be transformed into a garden with a vast variety of interesting flowers.
We are looking forward to your visit!
Image: Gisa Hausmann, Seidenmohn [Shirley Poppy], 1996, 38 x 56 cm (detail)
