THIS WHEEL´S ON FIRE A show in association with

THIS WHEEL´S ON FIRE
A show in association with Rob Tufnell
Aaron Angell, Michael Bauer, Will Benedict, Henning Bohl, William Copley,
Charlie Hammond, Corita Kent, David Robilliard
4. November – 19. Dezember 2015
This Wheel’s on Fire is an exhibition of shared enthusiasms. The title of the exhibition comes from Bob Dylan and Rick
Danko’s 1967 channeling of the Hebrew prophet Ezekiel’s writings
(c. 570 AD).
Aaron Angell’s ceramic sculptures were produced at his Troy Town Art Pottery in London. This ‘studio pottery’ is his selfstyled ‘psychedelic’ re-imagining of a mid twentieth century grouping of artisanal ceramicists. Amy Sherlock, writing in
Frieze Masters (2014), describes how Angell’s ‘… weirdly wonderful work is steeped in the folk and the folkloric: his
sculptural dioramas are like mushroom-induced visions of a bucolic England of myth and monster.’
Angell (b. 1987) lives and works in London. He has recently held solo exhibitions of his work at Studio Voltaire, London (2015),
SWG3, Glasgow (2013) and at Focal Point, Southend-on-Sea (2011) and his work has been included in significant group
exhibitions at Kestnergesellschaft, Hannover (2014), Palais de Tokyo, Paris and CCA Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw (2013). He is
currently participating in the British Art Show at Leeds City Art Gallery. In 2016 he will hold a solo exhibition of his work at
Kelvingrove Museum, Glasgow as part of the Glasgow International and his work will be included in a major survey exhibition at
Tate St. Ives.
Michael Bauer and Charlie Hammond’s print edition was produced for their exhibition ‘Euro Savage’ (2010) at Linn
Lühn. Their artistic collaboration emerged as a result of the curatorial work on the exhibition. Hammond and Bauer
created the series of four silkscreen prints (‘Euro 1 – 4’) together in Glasgow. Here, elements of both artists’ works, for
example Hammond’s wheel forms and Bauer’s facial fragments, enter entirely new relationships.
Michael Bauer (b. 1973) lives and works in New York. He has recently held exhibitions of his work at Alison Jacques Gallery,
London (2015) and Lisa Cooley Gallery, New York (2014). He has also had solo exhibitions at Villa Merkel, Esslingen am
Neckar (2011), Marquis Dance Hall, Istanbul (2010), Kunsthaus Baselland, Basel (2009) and Kunstverein Bonn (2007).
Charlie Hammond (b.1979) lives and works in Glasgow. He has recently held solo exhibitions of his work at Lisa Cooley, New
York (2014) and Galerie Kamm, Berlin (2012). His work was also included in ‘Generation’, a major survey of art produced in
Scotland at Tramway, Glasgow (2014).
Will Benedict and Henning Bohl are both well known for their individual practices as well as for collaborations with their
peers. ‘Bloat’, 2014, was produced in Paris at the Fondation Lafayette and combines found material sourced by both artists.
Bohl makes use of archetypal imagery taken from websites and fanzine publications related to Gothic, fantasy and roleplaying games from the 1970s and 1990s. Benedict’s imagery includes posters and invitations he created for a bar he
established in Vienna and exhibitions of his work at Galerie Balice Hertling, Paris and the University of Illinois, Chicago.
Benedict (b. 1978) lives and works in Paris. He recently held solo exhibitions of his work at Overduin & Co, Los Angeles,
Bortalami Gallery, New York and at Bergen Kunsthall, Bergen (2015). Other recent exhibitions were held at Galerie Balice
Hertling, Paris and Dépendance, Brussels (2014); Halle für Kunst, Lüneburg and Galerie Meyer Kainer, Vienna (2013) and
Neue Alte Brücke, Frankfurt/Main and Gió Marconi, Milan (2012).
Bohl (b.1975) lives and works in Hamburg. He recently held an exhibition with Sergei Tcherepnin at the Blaffer Art Museum,
University of Houston (2015). Other recent solo exhibitions of his work were held at Galerie Karin Guenther, Hamburg (2015),
Rob Tufnell, London (2014) Kunsthalle Nürnberg and Berlinische Galerie (2013) Pro Choice, Vienna (2012) and Kunstverein
in Hamburg (2011). His work was included in the Carnegie International, Pittsburgh (2013)
Where is here? # 2: Space and present
20 September to 22 November 2015
Eva Berendes
Alexandra Bircken
Henning Bohl
Madeleine Boschan
Paula Doepfner
Thomas Helbig
Thomas Kiesewetter
Karsten Konrad
Manfred Pernice
Katinka Pilscheur
Anahita Razmi
Gitte Schäfer
Scheibitz
Katja Strunz
Mirjam Thomann
Mirko Tschauner
Opening of the exhibition:
Sunday, 20 September at 11 am
We invite you and your friends are cordially!
In autumn 2014, we have the Kunstverein Reutlingen with the programmatic question of the presence - repositioned to answer
in the coming years if we painting, sculpture, sculpture or installation in the digital 21st century - "Where is here?" allow access
to the world or even provide explanations of the world. The program was started with an extensive group exhibition of painting
in autumn 2014, this year it continues with an exhibition on "space and present."
"Where is here? # 2 "is intended to give a diverse overview of recent artistic developments and trends in the spatial arts and at
the same time to make a first critical selection of outstanding positions, works and personalities to 2000th. It is to be an exhibition that is intended by the limits ago from where a work is still just sculpture or even just.
This exhibit is created confrontational and extremely contradictory starting points, styles and attitudes openly against each other
- and yet another - leads.
Because if you played well can be found only in person the answer to the question of the presence - presence as one's own
existence between past and future - it is precisely this which the challenge for artists, artist, viewer and us institutions of mediation consists. Just as the French philosopher Louis Althusser in 1977 in "Machiavelli's solitude" asked: How is it to think the new
in the total absence of its conditions succeed?
Early Awnings: Henning Bohl with Sergei Tcherepnin
Early Awnings is a collaboration between German artist Henning Bohl and American artist Sergei Tcherepnin. Organized by
Blaffer director and chief curator Claudia Schmuckli, the exhibition combines sculptures, drawings, and sound into an immersive installation that imbues objects and imagery with fantastic forms and symbols to serve as a multidimensional platform for
storytelling.
Grounded in feelings of malaise with the state of the world and invested in the creative exploration of vulnerability and fear,
Bohl has created a series of fantasy illustrations entitled Kadath Fatal that draw inspiration from the imagery evoked in the
literary genres of Cosmic Horror and Fantasy of Manners and the visual language of related graphic novels. The series borrows its title from American author H. P. Lovecraft’s novella The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath (1926/27)—Kadath being a
mythical peak where gods dwell “in the cold waste where no man treads.” However, unlike Lovecraft (1890-1937), whose illustrated novels locate fear in an inconceivable “other” descending to earth from outer space, Bohl brings those horrors closer
to home. Turning cheese, cakes, ribbons and cornets—traditionally given to every German child on her first day of school—
into monstrous presences, he conjures the subtle forms of terror and estrangment that await us in the everyday.
As striking for their overwhelmingly yellow palette as for their fantastical imagery, Bohl’s drawings invoke the signature style of
British author and illustrator Aubrey Beardsely (1872-1898), who, along with American writer Henry Harland (1861-1905) coedited The Yellow Book (1894-97), a leading British arts and literary periodical associated with Aestheticism and Decadence
that helped define the last decade of the 19th century as “The Yellow Nineties.”
Complementing the drawings is a series of fabricated metal awnings installed along the perimeter of the gallery. They serve
as both framing devices for the drawings as well as projection devices for the sound installation developed with Tcherepnin.
Bohl considers awnings to be strange objects when contemplated on their own. Often beautiful but aesthetically alien to the
facades they are attached to, they have no true architectural function other than marking and easing the transition from one
domain into another. Transposed into a gallery setting, the awnings become symbolic markers of transition and literally set the
stage for a play that brings the real (the physical installation in the gallery) and the imaginary (the realm evoked through drawings, text, and audio) into conversation.
A large sculpture of a withered bouquet of elongated, hornlike forms—resembling the empty, levitating cornucopia seen in
many of the drawings—occupies the center of the room, complete with table and a bottomless watering pot. Set against the
background of a moss green carpet, its “blooms” offer floral interpretations of the alphorn, a distinctive wooden horn instrument found in Europe’s alpine regions, while its built-in speakers project sound into the gallery.
Just as the drawings’ conical shapes formally recall the flower horns, the awnings literally echo the sounds coming from the
sculpture, creating a musical dialogue in which the bouquet and the awnings are both actors and musicians. Written and recorded by Bohl and Tcherepnin, the sounds conflate gothic, baroque and folk elements edited into the repetitive pattern typical
of soundtracks for video games. In a sonic play of call and response, the awnings intermittently come alive with a different
sound, forming and asserting their own “voices” from different points in space before disappearing again into the background.
About the artists
Henning Bohl lives and works in Hamburg, Germany. His work has been exhibited regularly at Casey Kaplan Gallery, New York;
Johan König Gallery, Berlin; Galerie Karin Günther, Hamburg; and Meyer Kainer Gallery, Vienna. Recent solo and group exhibitions inclulde Hamburger Bahnhof, Castillo Corrales, Paris; Berlinische Galerie, Kunsthalle Nürnberg; Kunstverein Hamburg,
Bergen Kunsthall, ICA, London, the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne; Kunsthalle Baden Baden, Pro Choice, Vienna, Bundeskunsthalle Bonn; the Seattle Art Museum; ArtPace, San Antonio;
Portikus Frankfurt am Main, Tokyo Wonder Site, Cubitt, London, Witte de With, Rotterdam; and White Columns, New York.
The Blaffer Museum with Henning Bohl in Houston Presents Sergei Tcherepnin
Blaffer Art Museum is pleased to present Early Awnings, a collaboration between German artist Henning Bohl and American artist Sergei Tcherepnin. Organized by Blaffer director and chief curator Claudia
Schmuckli, the exhibition opens with a public conversation between Bohl and Tcherepnin at 6:30 p.m. Friday, May 29, immediately followed by a reception from
7 to 9 p.m. The exhibition continues through Sept. 5.
In Early Awnings: Henning Bohl with Sergei Tcherepnin,
the artists combine sculptures, drawings, and sound
into an immersive installation that imbues objects and
imagery with fantastic forms and symbols that serve
as a multidimensional platform for storytelling.
Grounded in feelings of malaise with the state of the
world and invested in the creative exploration of vulnerability and fear, Bohl has created a series of fantasy
illustrations entitled Kadath Fatal that draw inspiration
from the imagery evoked in the literary genres of Cosmic Horror and Fantasy of Manners and the visual language of related graphic novels. The series borrows
its title from American author H. P. Lovecraft's novella
The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath (1926/27)-Kadath being a mythical peak where gods dwell "in the
cold waste where no man treads." However, unlike Lovecraft (1890-1937), whose illustrated novels locate fear in an inconceivable "other" descending to earth from outer space, Bohl brings those horrors closer to home. Turning cheese, cakes, ribbons
and cornets--traditionally given to every German child on her first day of school--into monstrous presences, he conjures the
subtle forms of terror and estrangement that await us in the everyday.
As striking for their overwhelmingly yellow palette as for their fantastical imagery, Bohl’s drawings invoke the signature style of
British author and illustrator Aubrey Beardsely (1872-1898), who, along with American writer Henry Harland (1861-1905) coedited The Yellow Book (1894-97), a leading British arts and literary periodical associated with Aestheticism and Decadence
that helped define the last decade of the 19th century as “The Yellow Nineties.”
Complementing the drawings is a series of fabricated metal awnings installed along the perimeter of the gallery. They serve as
both framing devices for the drawings as well as projection devices for the sound installation developed with Tcherepnin. Bohl
considers awnings to be strange objects when contemplated on their own. Often beautiful but aesthetically alien to the facades
they are attached to, they have no true architectural function other than marking and easing the transition from one domain into
another. Transposed into a gallery setting, the awnings become symbolic markers of transition and literally set the stage for a
play that brings the real (the physical installation in the gallery) and the imaginary (the realm evoked through drawings, text, and
audio) into conversation.
A large sculpture of a withered bouquet of elongated, hornlike forms-resembling the empty, levitating cornucopia seen in many
of the drawings-occupies the center of the room, complete with table and a bottomless watering pot. Set against the background of a moss green carpet, its "blooms" offer floral interpretations of the alphorn, a distinctive wooden horn instrument
found in Europe's alpine regions, while its built-in speakers project sound into the gallery.
Just as the drawings' conical shapes formally recall the flower horns, the awnings literally echo the sounds coming from the
sculpture, creating a musical dialogue in which the bouquet and the awnings are both actors and musicians. Written and recorded by Bohl and Tcherepnin, the sounds conflate gothic, baroque and folk elements edited into the repetitive pattern typical of soundtracks for video games. In a sonic play of call and response, the awnings intermittently come alive with a different
sound, forming and asserting their own "voices" from different points in space before disappearing again into the background.
About the artists
Henning Bohl is based in Hamburg, Germany. His work has been exhibited regularly at Casey Kaplan Gallery, New York; Johan
König Gallery, Berlin; Galerie Karin Günther, Hamburg; and Meyer Kainer Gallery, Vienna. Recent solo and group exhibitions
inclulde Hamburger Bahnhof, Castillo Corrales, Paris; Berlinische Galerie, Kunsthalle Nürnberg; Kunstverein Hamburg, Bergen
Kunsthall, ICA, London, the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne; Kunsthalle Baden Baden, Pro Choice, Vienna, Bundeskunsthalle Bonn; the Seattle Art Museum; ArtPace, San Antonio; Portikus
Frankfurt am Main, Tokyo Wonder Site, Cubitt, London, Witte de With, Rotterdam; and White Columns, New York.
“The Blaffer Museum with Henning Bohl in Houston Presents Sergei Tcherepnin”, Broadway Art World (online), May 30, 2015
HENNING BOHL - KADATH FATAL
18 APRIL - 17 MAY 2014
Press Release
Rob Tufnell presents an exhibition of new works by Henning Bohl.
Bohl has previously employed a wide variety of media accommodating found materials and taking the form of free-standing
sculpture, sculptural reliefs, friezes, collages, prints, posters, and videos.
Bohl’s most recent work consists of drawings that draw references from a wide variety of popular and archetypal imagery
familiar to him from his adolescence. They incorporate styles learned from, amongst other things, Aubrey Beardsley, (18721898), Métal Hurlant comic books (1974-2004) and Blair Reynolds and other graphic artists associated with Pagan Publishing
(1990-1993). As with his previous works, these drawings employ modest yet very specific materials.
The title of the exhibition references a mythical peak where gods dwell ‘in the cold waste where no man treads’ described in
H.P. Lovecraft’s ‘The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath’ (1926/27). Lovecraft’s novel itself drew from William Beckford’s gothic
horrow ‘Vathek’ (1786), Robert W. Chambers’ ‘The King in Yellow’ (1895) and the novels and short stories of Lord Dunsany
(Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany, 1878-1957).
Henning Bohl (b. 1975, Oldenburg, Germany) currently lives and works in Hamburg. He studied at the Kunsthochschule, Kassel
and at the Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main where he completed his studies in 2004. There have been recent public exhibitions
of his work at Kunsthalle Nürnberg and Berlinische Galerie (2013) Pro Choice, Vienna (2012); Kunstverein Hamburg (2011);
Artpace, San Antonio and Cubitt, London (2010); Grazer Kunstverein and Staatliche Kunsthalle, Baden-Baden (2009) and the
Oldenburger Kunstverein (2008). His work was recently presented at the Carnegie International, Pittsburgh (2013) and has also
been included in group exhibitions at venues including the Kunsthalle Bonn and the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art,
Melbourne (2013) Halle für Kunst, Lüneburg (2012); Portikus, Frankfurt am Main and Seattle Art Museum (2011); Kunstverein
Schattendorf; Kunstverein Hannover and CCA Ansratz, Mallorca (2010); White Columns, New York and Sammlung Grässlin,
St. Georgen (2009). He is represented by Galerie Karin Guenther in Hamburg; Galerie Meyer Kainer in Vienna; Casey Kaplan in
New York, and Galerie Johann KÖnig in Berlin.
Global Extravaganza, but on a Human Scale
by Roberta Smith
October 10, 2013
PITTSBURGH — The 2013 Carnegie International is a welcome shock to the system of one of the art world’s more entrenched rituals. This lean, seemingly modest, thought-out exhibition takes the big global survey of contemporary art off steroids.
With only 35 artists and collectives from 19 countries, the latest Carnegie says no to the visual overload and indigestible sprawl
frequent to these exhibitions. It also avoids the looming, big-budget showstoppers — aptly called festivalism by the critic Peter
Schjeldahl — for which they are known. Actually, the Carnegie all but leaves festivalism at the door: “Tip,” the immense, shambling, cheerfully derivative barrier of wood, fabric, cement and spray paint by the British sculptor Phyllida Barlow, just outside
the museum’s main entrance, is probably the show’s biggest single art object. Inside, almost nothing on view dwarfs the body,
addles the brain or short-circuits the senses. It’s just art. Did I mention that half of the artists are women?
The 2013 Carnegie has been organized by Daniel Baumann, the director of the Adolf Wölfli Foundation at the Kunstmuseum in
Bern, Switzerland, and Dan Byers and Tina Kukielski, two Carnegie curators. It may contribute to its deviation from convention
that the curators have little experience with big surveys and don’t belong to the international curatorial cartel that circles the
planet.
Their selections often evince a gratifying affinity for color, form, beauty and pleasure, and a lack of interest in finger-wagging
didacticism. They have appended to their show an impressive newly installed display of Modern and contemporary works from
the museum’s permanent collection that highlights acquisitions from the previous Carnegie Internationals (and includes a boxy,
tilted, very red and much stronger piece by Ms. Barlow).
The show itself accounts for much of the tangled strands of today’s art, with emerging artists under 35 in the slight majority,
and somewhat older ones adding ballast. There is space for occasional mini-retrospectives, including a sizable gallery filled with
nearly 35 years of text pieces, photo works and bright, diminutive riffs on Russian Constructivism by the mercurial Conceptualist
Mladen Stilinovic. A group of 19 increasingly robust paintings by Nicole Eisenman traces the evolution of her incisive reinterpretations of early Modernist figuration and mingles with new plaster sculptures. For example, “Prince of Swords,” a large male
figure with hands blackened by an overused smartphone sits on a plinth usually occupied by plaster casts in the museum’s
collection.
A cache of 57 undulant visionary landscapes by the American Joseph Yoakum (1890-1972) and 10 finely textured, scroll-like
drawings of phantoms by the Chinese Guo Fengyi (1942-2010) — both formidable outsider artists — are included as if it were
no big deal. The distinction was rendered moot by the extraordinary insider-outsider pileup of “The Encyclopedic Palace” at the
Venice Biennale. Yoakum may qualify as the greatest artist in this Carnegie simply because his art has stood the test of time
the longest.
Outstanding among the less familiar artists are two Iranians. In the 1960s and ’70s, especially, Kamran Shirdel (born in 1939)
made effortlessly structural, quietly subversive films, intended as propaganda, that were often banned by both the regime of
the Shah, which commissioned them, and that of its Ayatollah successors. Rokni Haerizadeh, 40 years younger, lives in exile
in Dubai and has an unerring gift — shaped by Persian painting and perhaps by Goya and Art Spiegelman — for reworking
found photographs into disturbing, if often beautiful, animations. His subjects here include the 2009 Iranian demonstrations and
Britain’s latest royal wedding.
Less expected is “The Playground Project,” a show-within-the-show organized by the Swiss writer and urban planner Gabriela
Burkhalter. Its dense history of postwar playground design — possibly better as a book — culminates in a wonderful assortment
of art from the Carnegie’s annual art camp for children. This summer’s used teaching plans devised by the artists Ei Arakawa
and Henning Bohl, who also contribute a playground-focused video. Though the Carnegie has no stated theme, the excellent
catalog places emphasis on play as essential to art and life; “The Playground Project” gives liberating experiential form to its
thesis.
This Carnegie International exposes the supposedly great divide between object-oriented or, as some would have it, marketdriven art, and activist, socially involved art and suggests that they are not nearly as mutually exclusive as often supposed.
To one side are the audacious computer-generated abstract canvases of Wade Guyton and the equally innovative handmade
plaster and casein tabletlike abstractions of Sadie Benning, as well as the richly colored sculptures of Vincent Fecteau, which
negotiate a new literally convoluted truce between the organic and the geometric.
On the other are Mr. Arakawa and Mr. Bohl’s art-camp collaboration and the especially inspiring social activism of Transformazium, a three-woman collective that relocated to Braddock, just outside Pittsburgh, from Brooklyn six years ago, determined to
make a difference. Their latest effort, part of the Carnegie show, is a permanent art-lending service in the library of this recovering town, stocked with works donated by the other artists in the Carnegie, local residents and Transformazium friends across
the country.
But the exhibition repeatedly illuminates the ground where form and activism overlap. In addition to the films and animations of
Mr. Shirdel and Mr. Haerizadeh, this area includes Zoe Strauss’s small, remarkably lively color photographs of local residents in
Homestead, another struggling Pittsburgh-area town. Also here are Zanele Muholi’s imposing black-and-white photo portraits
of South African lesbians and transgendered people, and the striking welded steel assemblages of Pedro Reyes, from Mexico,
which turn out to be amazing percussive instruments, even as you realize that they’re made from deactivated guns. Henry
Taylor’s implacable paintings of African-Americans and Sarah Lucas’s stuffed-pantyhose sculptures of brazen women are confrontational in both medium and message.
This exhibition attests to the health of object-making of all kinds and also to art-oriented activism, as in the Arakawa/Bohl art
classes and Transformazium project — suggesting that play is the crucial, underlying connection. But it points up the hazards,
if not laziness, of curatorial intervention and appropriation of other artists’ art. Paulina Olowska has put on view some puppets
from a once-flourishing Pittsburgh puppet theater; their intensity makes her photo-based paintings look wan. Gabriel Sierra
paints the museum’s Hall of Architecture deep purple to little effect, other than evoking the Brooklyn Museum’s installation missteps. And Pierre Leguillon strews 30 pots by the great ceramic artist George E. Ohr (1857-1918) around a Hirst-like vitrine,
along with Ohr’s zany promotional photographs. This is not art, it’s art abuse, especially painful since Ohr is as great as Yoakum,
whose wall of drawings is adjacent.
The exception is a display of 100 pencil and ink drawings made by North Vietnamese artists during the Vietnam War that the
Vietnamese artist Dinh Q. Le is presenting, accompanied by his poignant documentary about some who are still living. They
speak for themselves on film, as do the quick, deft ink or pencil renderings of soldiers and civilians on the wall, which fuse Eastern and Western traditions with personal expression, functioning as document, artifact and art.
The 2013 Carnegie International remains on view through March 16 at the Carnegie Museum of Art, 4400 Forbes Avenue,
Pittsburgh; (412) 622-3131, carnegieinternational.org.
Opening times:
Tuesday to Sunday 10 am–6 pm,
Wednesday 10 am–8 pm, closed on
Mondays and on 12.02.
Guided tours (German):
Every Wednesday at 6 pm and every
Sunday at 11 am and by advance reservation through the Kunst- und Kulturpädagogisches Zentrum der Museen in Nürnberg (KPZ)
department for adult education
Phone +49-(0)911/133-1238
or the schools department
Phone + 49 - (0)9 11 / 1 33 -12 41
The Kunsthalle Nürnberg is sponsored
by Contempo- raries e.V. friends of
the Kunsthalle Nürnberg. Application forms and information about the
friends of the Kunsthalle Nürnberg
are available on request, Phone +49(0)911/231-2853
Eröffnung: Mittwoch, 06. Feb., 20 Uhr
Opening: Wednesday, 06 Feb., 8 pm
Grußwort /Greeting:
Prof. Dr. Julia Lehner Kulturreferentin der
Stadt Nürnberg
Einführung/Introduction:
Ellen Seifermann
Leiterin der Kunsthalle Nürnberg
Henning Bohl, Welcome To Weapon World ii, 2012, ink on canvas, 90 x 60 cm
Courtesy Galerie Meyer Kainer, Wien/Vienna
Henning Bohl’s work encompasses large-format
paper cut- outs, canvases worked to produce a
relief-like effect, hybrid installations made from
stretching frames and table-like sculptures, and
also collages and drawings, in which found literary
elements often combine with calligraphic or fantastic forms and symbols. Bohl’s mostly fragile works
result from a multilayered sampling of references,
which evades easy attribution to customary patterns. His exhibitions are reminiscent of settings,
stage-like arrangements of props that refer to each
other as well as to the stylistic means of art history.
At the same time, the installations tell stories, in
which we find a merging of fictive and real elements, of graphic clarity and the timidly provisional,
of strict logic and amusing short leaps. The works
raise questions concerning key inter- pretative
ideas such as aesthetics and concept, object and
representation, display and perception.
Born in Oldenburg in 1975 (now living in Hamburg) the artist completed his studies at colleges
of art in Kassel and Frankfurt/ Main. Henning Bohl
has developed a set of completely new works,
mainly drawings, for his exhibition in Kunsthalle
Nürn- berg; they will be shown in combination
with already existing pieces. In addition, Bohl has
conceived an artist’s book, which presents the
sources, materials and backgrounds to his works
and topics for the first time.
1) Ausstellungsansicht/ exhibition view, Cornet of Horse, Johann König, Berlin, 2011
Courtesy Henning Bohl und/and Johann König, Berlin, Foto/photo: Roman März
2) Great Old One at Night, 2012, Filzstift auf Papier/felt pen on paper 47,4 x 35,1 cm
Courtesy Galerie Meyer Kainer, Wien/Vienna
3) Great Old One – 20%, 2012, Filzstift auf Papier/felt pen on paper 47,4 x 35,1 cm
Courtesy Galerie Meyer Kainer, Wien/Vienna
4) Installationsansicht/ installation view, Pro Choice, Wien/Vienna 2012, Foto/photo:
Philipp Timischl, Wien/Vienna
Muller, Dominikus “Reviews” Frieze, March 2012, p. 150.
GERMANY
Henning Bohl
Johann König, Berlin
Henning Bohl’s second solo show at Johann Konig, ‘Cornet of Horse’
comprised a series of 16 sculptures, all made in the same distinct manner to resemble functionless tables: the ‘table tops’ consist of wooden
canvas stretchers, on which the artist had placed various boards; the
legs are mostly made out of ‘Schultuten’ (which roughly translates to
‘school cones’) - cardboard cones which are usually filled with sweets
and given to children in Germany and Austria on their first day of school.
Some of the cones Bohl uses are brightly coloured, others are patterned
with typical kids’ motifs: horses, cats, cars, Star Wars characters, dragons. With the frames balancing precariously on the cones, the sculptures felt rickety, almost as if they could collapse (though sturdier legs
are in fact hidden inside). In pieces such as Pioneers or MTV cribs crib
(all works 2011), the board forms an arched roof, giving it the impression
of a fragile hut on cardboard stilts. Bohl’s repeated, basic construction
elements cones, wooden stretchers and boards - also evoked another
childhood memory: a modelling kit.
Bohl’s works could be seen as making nonchalant use of the
stripped-down elements of painting extended into three-dimensional
space, while also playing with the notion of art as interior design by literally converting paintings into tables. But central to this exhibition was the
artist’s economical use of the gallery: only four of the sculptures were
shown in the large main space, each accompanied by a single plain
white cardboard cone, which acted as a kind of location marker. The
remaining 12 could be found in a smaller space at the end of the main
room. Here they stood cramped, packed and densely stacked, almost
as if the room were a storage space guaranteeing a constant supply for
the front room as each of the works was sold. Bohl referred to the front
gallery as the ‘show room’ and the back space as a ‘garage’ - applying
terms from the world of car dealing to the one of art dealing.
As much as ‘Cornet of Horse’ was originally an attempt to expand the painted field into Sculptural space, it ended up being as much
a play on the meaning of the very concrete space in which the show took
Henning Bohl‘Cornet of Horse’2011 Installation views
place. This focus on the exhibition context was even more apparent con
sidering that Bohl showed the exact same group of works in his recent exhibition at the Kunstverein in Hamburg, even giving the same title to
both shows. In Hamburg, the series was shown together with older works: a typical institutional show with a clear retrospective character which left Bohl’s table sculptures to be perceived as the latest result of his ongoing artistic production. At Johann Konig, the same works were
presented without a supporting or narrative context, leaving the impression of mass-produced objects ready to be sold.
Bohl sites this repetition as a means of tackling today’s steady pressure on artists to constantly produce new works and to come
up with fresh ideas for each exhibition. Where others might produce multiple pieces in the same vein, Bohl calls his strategy of re-showing
exactly the same works ‘self sampling’ According to Bohl, this allows the artist to gain time for the more important things in life- things not
related to art. This self-sampling might be understood as an attempt to embrace exhaustion as a critically valuable strategy and a form of
artistic critique. But isn’t this too simple a way out of the economic and creative pressures of the art-world system? Bohl’s strategy is a selfreflexive one, concerned more with the modes of production than with the actual works produced. All that was needed to make the same
works function in a different context was a small twist. a ‘weak tweak’ and a consciously lazy joke. Just give everyone what they want: give
the institution its retrospective show, give the gallery its sales exhibition. If it’s already ironically distanced - even better. All that was left here
was the quiet purringof efficiency.
-Dominikus Muller
150 frieze March 2012
HENNING BOHL
NAMENLOSES GRAUEN
EXHIBITION DATES: MARCH 29 – APRIL 28, 2012
OPENING: THURSDAY, MARCH 29, 6:00 – 8:00PM
For the last few months these pictures have been my monsters of the week. They form the consequences of the decisions I have taken and
these consequences have an afterlife of consequences, which I have had to face. So, I accepted the fate that these fictions of mine have
become truth - and more - actual materializations; that I have, from the depth of my windowless studio, unleashed another artwork upon a
world already crowded with others.
These pictures are not about painting. They are also not about being monochrome, despite the fact that some of them are monochrome
paintings. The ones that are painted, I painted as my own assistant for economical reasons but also out of interest. You can, if you have the
taste for it, look out for an artist “touch” but it was merely a paint job: I p..painted those p..pictures because there was no other way.
These pictures are about the reasons why they are what they are. The moment I decided to consider those reasons, they consumed the
entire process and formed a net of logical steps and necessities that created a path, which I followed.
And this path has led me here:
If one really has to lay out the reasons in front of the audience, it would usually go like this: to apply certain strategies of conceptualization to
your object, enhance the cultural capital of your source, connect it with what you have done and thus create meaning - and value.
For example: I found a box of tape dispensers in the shape of doughnuts over a year ago in Japan and for me they do form a perfectly created mass-produced fiction. It’s obvious that this form is ideal for its function, as it is able to fully encapsulate the roll of tape, and in doing
so keep it clean from dust. But to further admit (the people from Scotch Tape Lab admitted...) that the product looks like a doughnut, and to
then match the color of the product with the colors of the different flavors you might find in the icings of a real doughnut shop, is what made
this surreal fiction become a rare reality for me.
As I have said, reasons come in like doughnuts and they lead the way. Once the doughnuts took place on the pictures, there needed to be
a carpet to connect the paintings to a space and this space couldn’t be the gallery as it was. It had to have a layer of “icing” on the floor,
just as the canvases had to have a layer of “icing”, which is the paint. The paint references the color scheme of the tape dispensers that
surround them, which refers to the color and flavor of the icing on the doughnuts. So the carpet had to have the color of one of the paintings, and there were only so many colors to choose from.
The same is true for the fabric that depicts a model of the universe that is, rightly so, without center. Weirdly enough, it replaces our common understanding of outer space as an endless expansion of different parts with a map of endlessly expanding, repeating numbers of
the same limited parts. This draws a parallel to the possibilities and limitations of cultural expression we find these days. This fabric, if
divided into square partitions, shows four times the planet Earth. And in focusing on this part by cutting a square around these planets into
the square partition of the possibly endless roll of fabric, we get an outtake that organizes its main subjects along diagonal crossing lines
towards the outer frame instead of pointing to its center. In following this already given direction, it was only logical to emphasize this movement and add to it by using objects that orbit around that empty center on the outer side of the stretcher - to build a virtual frame around
that frame. (In a similar but reversed logic the square monochrome pictures point to an empty center and carry their raison d´etre towards
the outside.)
Today, similar reasons that legitimize art are often to be found, whether it is: the size of a Manet in relation to the size of a monochrome
painting, the insight that two complimentary colors on two paintings would mix into the grey tones you usually give to your other pictures (to
stay in the discourse of younger monochromatic paintings), or the reasons one might have to reproduce the sandaled foot of the Statue of
Liberty, or any of the many other reasons that can always be found to drive a little bit further down the road.
Older monochromes, as I maybe tend to misunderstand them, seem to me an attempt to deny all of this. An attempt to deny all of these
relational, referential and legitimizing aspects. Or better yet, they build a negative dialectical approach next to it. In my fantasy, they resemble
very much the impossible task that a writer of cosmic horror fiction faces - to describe entities that have no structural, organic or functional
resemblance to anything from our world yet have to carry out the means of their own intentions (that is to hail and kill). In an attempt to
focus exactly on the limitations of the imagination, the best of the writers and painters of these genres create a hill of denial that offers a
precise perspective upon the valley of the limitations of human existence, first of all the limitations of gravity.
Henning Bohl, Zürich, March 2012
Now
SEE
This
Herbert, Martin. “Now See This” Art Review, March 2012 p. 30-31
The freshing perspective pursued by the equally playful Henning Bohl,
meanwhile, is one on the very mechanisms of display. Bohl’s art broadly resembles
painting (via bright, hard-edged graphics), but his shows concern themselves not so
much with the work itself as how it’s laid out: his last Casey Kaplan show was a near
mathematical arrangement of colorful, hard-edge abstractions made by cutting and
pasting window display paper onto canvas, diversely arranged on trestles decorated
with fragments of text, the whole operating less as a show of paintings (with no paint
on them) than as a stuttering theatrical environment: a demonstration of possibilities,
rather than a final statement. -Martin Herbert
Henning Bohl, International Artists-in-Residence show, 2010
(installation view, Artpace San Antonio) Courtesy of the artist and Casey Kaplan, New York
D E R K U N S T V E R E I N,
S E I T 1817.
Henning Bohl
Cornet of Horse
25 June–11 September 2011
Opening:
Friday, 24 June 2011
Der Kunstverein, since 1817.
Klosterwall 23
20095 Hamburg
www.kunstverein.de
The exhibition “Cornet of Horse” features several installation settings by Berlin-based artist Henning Bohl
(born in 1975) that are linked both in terms of content and in terms of recurring motifs and materials and
the way these are employed. Besides referring to each other, Bohl’s works also contain numerous, often
subtle references to other art (movements). While his use of references follows a certain logic, it does
not necessarily aim to produce meaning. In addition to exploring various possibilities for generating picture motifs, Bohl also poses questions about the presentation and staging of art. Large-scale canvasses
featuring collages of layered shapes cut from rolls of paper hang from plasterboard elements that are piled
on sawhorses, creating their own architecture alongside the architecture of the exhibition space. This
questioning on the part of the artist—which for him can never be finally resolved—causes the status of his
work to be relativized in several different ways. Thus the pictures
are relegated to the status of stage props, while the means of presentation take on an independent sculptural and conceptual significance of their own.
The exhibition of Henning Bohl is funded by Hamburgische Kulturstiftung. The Kunstverein Hamburg is
funded by Freie und Hansestadt Hamburg – Kulturbehörde.
For Immediate Release: November 18, 2010
Media Contact: Matt Johns
t 210 212 4900 x314
f 210 212 4990
[email protected]
www.artpace.org
ARTPACE SAN ANTONIO UNVEILS 10.3 INTERNATIONAL ARTIST-INRESIDENCE PROJECTS
San Antonio, TX - Artpace San Antonio is pleased to announce the unveiling of its 10.3 International Artist-inResidence projects, opening on November 18, 2010. Guest curator Michael Darling, the James W. Alsdorf Chief
Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, will present new works by Henning Bohl (Berlin, Germany),
Roy McMakin (Seattle, Washington), Adam Schreiber (Austin, TX), which will be on display to the public through
January 9, 2011.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Henning Bohl’s installation, View from Bidston Hill, is an exploration of the componenets that make up an artwork’s
composition. Referencing sculpture, painting, and collage, the gallery is populated with a blend of art and common
objects related by a circle motif. Bohl mined local lumber stores, bicycle shops, and marine outfitters for supplies,
even incorporating disposable beverages containers in his work. In this exhibition of interrelated parts, Bohl presents an alternative model of image making that plays off the Modern painting strategies, where the subject of the
artwork is not painted but rather consists of the objects itself, presented within a pictorial space. Moreover bungee
cords and chinstraps not only make literal connections inside the work but also allude to the compositional connections the artist employs to link the entire installation together.
Roy McMakin’s artwork crosses many disciplines; his practice integrates furniture, architecture, sculpture, photography, and installation. Over the course of his career, he has moved back and forth between construction and
documentation of domestic objects and buildings. His Artpace exhibition, Other Chest of Drawers & Other People
includes a collection of fabricated and found furniture objects and three video works that relate to the chest, in terms
of home furnishings as well as human anatomy. His sculptures are mediated by people; colaborations with woodworkers and assistants form a significant feature of the exhibition. The artist’s intentional decision not to originate
or construct any of the objects on display is notable. He used, instead, a set of subjective directions to guide this
series of work, as well as his keen eye for design, spending hours rummaging through San Antonio thrift and furniture stores. Additionally he chose to push his photographic concepts of scale and perspective by introducing the
elements of time and movement, leading to his first video pieces in 25 years.
Adam Schreiber is an Austin-based photographer who mines the potential meanings of cultural artifacts and abandoned corporate spaces. He utilizes objects from existing collections and archives as the source of his photography, often re-documenting items in a state of preservation. By isolating imagery of outdated technology and sterile
laboratory settings from their cultural significance, Schreiber enables the viewer to re-imagine these spaces and
objects in new and unexpected ways. The DeLorean DMC-12 is the subject of Adam Schreiber’s exhibition, Diminishing Return, which features a series of color and monochromatic photographs showing fragments from the automobile. Over the course of his residency, Schreiber paid several visits to the DMC surplus facility in Humble, Texas,
photographing fragments of the Phoenix-like DMC-12 vehicle and its storage environment. Images include console
vents, transmission parts, storage boxes, and shock absorbers. Varied in scale and content, the photographs convey an otherworldliness of these benign items, shown as they are isolated in vast white spaces devoid of context.
ABOUT THE CURATOR
Michael Darling is the James W. Alsdorf Chief Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Prior to his appointment in Chicago, he served as the
Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seattle Art Museum from 2006-2010. While there, he organized distinguished exhibitions, including Gaylen Hansen, Three Decades of Painting (2008-08), Su-Mei Tse (2008), Dennis
Oppenheim: Safey Cones (2008), and Target Practice: Painting Under Attack 1949-78 (2009). Darling also served
as an assistant curator at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art beginning in 1998, where he organized
Superflat, in collaboration with the artist Takashi Murakami (2001); Seattle artist/architect Roy McMakin’s first museum survey (2002); and Painting in Tongues, a survey of single artists whose practices span many mediums (2006).
Darling received his Ph.D. from University of California, Santa Barbara, on the furniture of 20th-century American
designer George Nelson.
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
The 10.3 International Artist-in-Residence program is made possible by the Linda Pace Foundation, the City of San
Antonio’s Office of Cultural Affairs, National Endowment for the Arts, and Nimoy Foundation, with additional support
from Rebecca and Alexander Stewart. Special thanks to Artpace board member Christopher C. Hill and Rodolfo
Choperena.
ABOUT ARTPACE
Artpace is a contemporary art center located in San Antonio, Texas, with residencies, exhibitions, and education
programs that nurture the creative expression of emerging and established artsists, while actively engaging youth
and adult audiences. Renowned for its International Artist-in-Residence program (IAIR), Artpace annually hosts
three eight-week residences, each of which features one Texas artist, one national artist and one international artist,
who are all selected by a notable guest curator, and culminates into an (adjective) exhibition. The mission of this
program is to provide artists with unparalleled resources that allow them to take time, take provocative risks and
unveil new ideas. Founder and Director of Prospect New Orleans, Dan Cameron says, “Artpace is really head and
shoulders above any other organization of its kind right now. The work created at Artpace goes on to show at some
of the world’s most distinguished venues, often presenting a pivotal moment in an artist’s career. Jeffrey Deitch,
Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles explains, “Projects that began at Artpace that are still
exhibitied all over the world, Artpace really makes art happen.”
Artpace is located downtown at 445 North Main Avenue, between Savings and Martin streets, San Antonio, Texas.
Free parking is available at 513 North Flores Street. Artpace is open to the public Wednesday through Sunday, 125pm, and by appointment. Admission is free.
san antonio
artpace
HENNING
BOHL
NOV 18, 2010 > JAN 9, 2011
IAIR 10.3
INTERNATIONAL ARTIST-IN-RESIDENCE
View from Bidston Hill
HENNING BOHL Berlin, Germany
ROY McMAKIN Seattle, Washington
ADAM SCHREIBER Austin, Texas
Guest Curator
Michael Darling, James W. Alsdorf Chief Curator,
Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA), Illinois
HENNING BOHL
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Berlin-based artist Henning Bohl’s work is an investigation of the language and structure of painting. He often pushes his
vividly hued paintings into the realm of sculpture through collaging curled paper onto canvas or utilizing canvas supports in
unconventional ways. Increasingly, the artist has been incorporating common consumer objects into his works by physically
attaching them to the surface of his paintings as inquiries into how painting and sculpture can relate to everyday objects.
Bohl attended Kunsthochschule Kassel, Germany, from 1997 to 2000, and Städelschule Frankfurt am Main in Frankfurt,
Germany, from 2000 to 2004. He has had solo
exhibitions at Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden, Germany
(2009); Oldenburger Kunstverein, Germany (2008);
Casey Kaplan, New York, New York (2007); Galerie
Daniel Buchholz, Cologne, Germany (2006); and
Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf, Germany (2005). His work has been included
in group exhibitions, including Zuordnungsprobleme,
Galerie Johann König, Berlin, Germany (2008);
Egypted, Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna, Austria
(2008); and Alt Rein Neu Raus, Galerie Christian
Nagel, Berlin (2007).
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
Henning Bohl’s installation, View from Bidston Hill,
is an exploration of the components that make up
an artwork’s composition. Referencing sculpture,
painting, and collage, the gallery is populated with a
blend of art and common objects related by a circle
Henning Bohl, Corner of a Cornfield, 2010. Installation view. Photo
courtesy of the artist; Casey Kaplan; Cubitt, London; and Johann König, motif. Bohl mined local lumber stores, bicycle shops,
and marine outfitters for supplies, even incorporating
Berlin
disposable beverage containers in his work.
An exercise in composition, Bohl places several white bicycle helmets supported by large foam soda cups in the center
of the gallery on a stage-like structure. Using conventional canvas stretcher bars and containers as a set for the graphic
interplay of objects, Bohl further reorganizes the gallery as a theatrical space where elements of one shape play off those of
another.
One stretcher frame piece features several rectangular and curved panels of heavily grained wood connected by marinegrade bungee cord. These elastic ropes act as formal devices that move one’s eye across the exterior of the work. The
surface of a similar adjacent piece—a blank white gessoed canvas with a black and yellow bicycle helmet attached to it
with a different set of marine-grade cord—is activated through a similar network of chinstraps and cables. In both works,
holes have been cut into the substrate material,
and in addition to their functional role—allowing
for the cords to snake in and out—the openings
become an integral part of the overall design.
Precut holes form the composition and support
for the pegboard drawings that appear opposite
the helmet and corded works. Bohl’s drawings
contain many of the formal strategies at play
in the larger works in the show. The pegboard
frame contains the title from the cover of a book
he found in Berlin years ago, augmented by an
ampersand drawn on it with marker in various
iterations from piece to piece. While the pegboard punchouts serve as a more consistent
gridded support for these works on paper, they
relate formally as well to the circle motif repeated
throughout the displayed work.
In this exhibition of interrelated parts, Bohl presents an alternative model of image making that
plays off of Modern painting strategies, where
the subject of the artwork is not painted but
rather consists of the objects itself, presented
within a pictorial space. Moreover bungee cords
and chinstraps not only make literal connections
inside the work but also allude to the compositional connections the artist employs to link the
entire installation together.
—Alexander Freeman, Education Curator
Henning Bohl, Directions Chap, RRIII, 2010. Photo by Todd Johnson
Bennett, Steve, “Also at Artpace: furniture as art, arbitrary works”, San Antonio Express-News, Sunday, December 12, 2010, http://www.mysanantonio.com/
entertainment/visual_arts/article/Also-at-Artpace-furniture-as-art-arbitrary-works-871482.php
K
SAN ANTONIO
EXPRESS-NEWS
S.A. LIFE
AND
CULTURAS
Also at Artpace: furniture as art, arbitrary works
Henning Bohl
“View from Bidston Hill”
Combining painting, collage and
sculpture, Henning Bohl’s Artpace installation was inspired, at
least in name, by the 19th-century,
Pre-Raphaelite British painter William Davis’ popular landscape. Wall
works include four wood panels cut
with circles, rectangles and wavy
shapes, bound together by colorful
marine-grade bungee cord. They are,
in some ways, an extension of the
35-year-old Berlin artist’s paintings,
on which he collages curling paper
in tubular rolls to heighten depth and
dimension. Along one wall are manipulated images of a book cover
of “The Americans and the Artists,”
which Bohl says is “the only thing I
brought with me” from Germany. The
centerpiece of the Artpace installation features white bicycle helmets on
a wooden stage-like structure supported by foam cups. Of the bicycle
helmet, which has recently been in
the news with the cycling death of
San Antonio artist Chuck Ramirez,
Bohl says, “It’s a thing you don’t
want to wear because it’s so weird,
PHOTOS COURTESY ARTPACE
Berlin artist Henning Bohl’s installation “View from Bidston Hill” is on view at Artpace.
but the actual object is so beautiful. I
couldn’t make something myself like
that; it’s the perfect object.” Overall,
Bohl succeeds in an installation that
is “very arbitrary,” a quality he says he
was striving for. “I may not even know
what I’m trying to say,” he says.
—Steve Bennett
REVIEWS
HENNING BOHL
CUBITT - LONDON
For those who haven’t seen Henning Bohl’s vis’ work. Similarly, the wood and plasterboard
art firsthand, a warning: photographs of it can trestles that both physically support and debe misleading. In reproduction, his boldly col- scribe schematic viewing spaces for these colored paper collages resemble peeling post- lages (it’s tempting, though inaccurate, to call
ers or aging scenery; up close, the corners of them paintings) are neither tables nor walls nor
paper that curl away from their primed canvas stages nor scenery, though they refer to all four.
Instead, Bohl opens the floor to various
support are extravagantly graceful. It is the
wrinkles and air bubbles in the glued paper dialectics: between aesthetic pleasure and
surfaces, however, that are surprising, and give frank pragmatism; between the front and the
installations such as “Corner of a Cornfield,” back of an image; between the referent and
made for Cubitt Gallery, an appealing vulner- the context of its reception. At Cubitt, the two
collages were hung not on the wall but in the
ability.
That is just as well, because Bohl’s can be center of the space, making it hard to see the
an arch, forbiddingly rarified aesthetic. When front sides of both simultaneously. It is this frahe makes reference to the paintings of Japa- gility, and this awareness of the images’ flawed
nese Kabuki make-up, theater sets or, as in sculptural construction, that give “Corner of a
this exhibition, a painting by the English pre- Cornfield” a tension and an intelligent, though
Raphaelite William Davis, his stylized treatment compromised, beauty.
Jonathan Griffin
of his material results in installations that, at
first, seem to transform images and ideas into
pure decoration. Although the gold-colored
paper employed in the two large-scale collages displayed here­­­­­­­—both titled Corner of a
Cornfield (2010)—might just about link them
to a vision of swaying corn, there is little else
HENNING BOHL, Corner of aCornfield, 2010. Instalto guide the viewer to a connection with Da- lation view at Cubitt, London. Photo: Dave Morgan.
116
FlashArt
•
MAY JUNE 2010
BEHIND THE SCREENS
On Henning Bohl at Galerie Johann König, Berlin
by Michelle Cotton
In the exhibitions of Berlin-based artist
Henning Bohl, images and objects are
never presented as isolated individual
works, but are rather always brought into
an installation context which both choreographs the movement of the observer
in space and makes the works, often assembled from industrially-produced materials, appear as props for a coming performance.
The title of Bohl’s first solo exhibition at
the Galerie Johann König thus promised a
questioning of theatre today. Reduced to
a decorative palette, image objects, produced from the overlay, folding and collage of rolled-out paper webs and uniting
equally multi-layered references to the history of visual and performance art, transformed the space of the gallery into a theatrical parcours. Which perspectives and insights, however, resulted from this peek behind the scenes?
There are six or seven canvases mounted on cornicing at Johann König. Some of the cornice belong to the gallery architecture,
another part has just been installed, it divides the space in two. The canvases stop just short of eye-level. Brightly coloured,
animate shapes are stuck down to the white material, they crease as they overlap and pockets of air blister the surface. Some
of the edges have been left to curl like tired posters. Their titles are fragments of the words theater heute/psychology today, the
letters appear in black text next to each canvas like the installments of a broken text message.
Henning Bohl’s paper cut-outs adapt the technique adopted by Henri Matisse during the 1940s. His health deteriorating,
Matisse began to compose pictures and layout designs for textiles, stained glass, ceramics and colour lithography with cut
paper covered with gouache paint. He would talk of the sculptural nature of the work, cutting through pigment, describing the
process as “drawing with scissors”.[1]_ The graphic effect of the flat colour and hard lines made the cut- outs adaptable to reproduction in print. Matisse used Linel gouaches in a range of colours that corresponded directly to the inks used by commercial
printers and the cut-outs frequently found translation in pochoir prints, the most famous example being his 1947 book, jazz.
Bohl’s paper is screen-printed, the uncoated, white underside furling- in occasionally to make an ornamental relief. Calligraphic
scythes of colour moving through the compositions and paper curling on the surface of the canvas lodge an idea of painted
scrolls and ancient, Oriental, graphic arts. Other motifs have a more domestic appeal; a line is folded back and forth like streamers or ribbon, dots and tear shapes are scattered like Fuzzy Felt or confetti. Bohl’s schemes tap a flood of associations in a
cartoon palette, from prehistoric cave painting, tapestries and Japanese Emakimono scrolls to festive decoration and abstract
figuration.
An interview with Bohl some years ago referred to a photograph of Matisse.[2]_ The artist sits in his wheelchair completely absorbed in his work, he is positioned in the middle of the studio and there is a carpet of cut paper scattered like autumn leaves at
his feet. He is physically and mentally enveloped in the work. Bohl was fascinated by this picture of the artist fashioning his own
legacy, a case of history within history. The images of one history hold Matisse’s objects in tact, they must be colour-matched
and faithful to the original object. The other series of images show the work in a state of flux, they stage a “behind the scenes”
narrative and it is the artist not the object that assumes the central role. It is this notion of a meta-history, of parallel and conflicting narratives for the object that comes to mind in the dual aspect of this exhibition, “The ate rT oday” (sic). Moving amongst
Bohl’s canvases the text and individual graphic elements leak out piece-by-piece. His objects are often crafted with the scale
and basic structure of stage scenery and looking up at these panels becomes like taking in parts of a set from the stalls. There’s
a fictional distance implicit in their position, they address the space as if it were an auditorium. Bohl engenders the kind of looking that goes on in churches or world heritage sites; wandering round, head back, trying to follow the scheme of imagery whilst
running the risk of accidental collision. This device of physical separation from the work alters the view and frames the encounter
in a manner analogous to the proscenium arch in a theatre. The art literally appears to exist in another space.
That this performative encounter with the work should occur so naturally attests to references that have moved from the periphery of Bohl’s work to its core logic. “The ate rT oday” does not merely refer to the active modes of making art and constructing
meaning, it self-consciously stages these ideas in its choreography. The tears, dots and bow-shaped characters slashing into
these compositions are familiar from previous exhibitions. Partly decorative, partly a cipher in a symbolic scheme, they are elements in a stock repertoire that has evolved with reference to the stylized traditions of Japanese Kabuki theatre. Stuck down,
overlapping, layer upon layer, they are worn like emblems in Bohl’s work. Like the masks painted on the actors to denote character or the use of pattern and repeat motifs in stage design to describe the texture of woodgrain, waves or cherry blossom
they reside on the surface of the work. Their repetition and countless combinations have the same playful pop appeal as the
paper scattered at Matisse’s feet. Bohl’s assemblage of emblems recommends itself as a decorative scheme to be applied and
adapted to cover any surface. In this way it emulates the versatile nature of Matisse’s cut-outs and their various manifestations
in reproduction.
This emblematic status extends to Bohl’s treatment of the work itself. The panels are hung decoratively from the architecture of
the exhibition like bunting, avoiding the walls and the floor as if they would refute any association with painting or sculpture. Previous shows by Bohl have proposed an idea of enclosure with an assemblage of flat or paneled structures that form bounda-ries
or interruptions. Grids, nets and trellis have referenced a discreet, almost decorative form of instruction through design, the kind
of control exercised by flimsy fencing made with a purpose more symbolic than effective. Here Bohl creates a sense of space
and physical liberty, encouraging us to weave our own path within his dramaturgy whilst directing a reverent pose toward the
work and marking out a path in the textual formula for the exhibition. Everything becomes locked in the sequence of language
itself, the canvases drop down like huge illuminated letters. They are tied to the words, inserted in the lettering and titled after it,
willing them to an act of illustration. Bohl creates a scenario, entreating a spectacle of reading and an act of engagement that
has the look of revelation. The canvases are poised to impart narrative, but ultimately, an interior logic rules. The panels make
blank incursions on the words, overriding their integrity with their own system of associations and ideas.
The titles of the individual works, the text along the gallery cornice and the title of the exhibition itself, refer to two magazines,
Theater Heute and Psychologie Heute. Their names advertise a niche specialism and a shared approach to the technical deconstruction of their respective fields. Bohl is doubtless drawing parallels with his own self-reflexive practice. Specialist concerns
with the history of art and art production are the primary subject matter for Bohl’s own work, but his pairing and wordplay with
these magazines fashions a binary from their subjects, theatre and psychology. Whereas one is fundamentally about the production of a fiction, the other is to do with breaking it down. Covers from Psychologie Heute hang on the wall, bracketing the
exhibition, and Bohl quotes directly from the imagery (a series of staged portraits by his friend, Sabine Reitmaier). The themes of
Theater Today, the staged image or encounter, the notion of approaching visual media with a narrative, the action of writing or
reading narrative and the dual role of the object within these events are anchored in these portraits. The narrative content of the
models’ gaze, expression and pose is framed within Bohl’s scheme and the magazines become actors translating ideas from
text to physical drama. What occurs is something equivalent to the photograph of Matisse. Like Matisse, the magazines appear
within a prevailing assemblage of graphic characters, familiar from the artist’s (in this case, Bohl) other work. The magazines
appear as direct quotes. Bohl is self- consciously revealing the primary source material for the exhibition, staging a “behind the
scenes” account of his creative process. The models pose is fixed in concentration, they look into the lens of the camera or
hold a finger to the lips or cradle their face with their hands as if intent on some silent, telepathic communication. Within Bohl’s
scheme these magazines dramatize both the construction of narrative and its unravelling, the staging of an image and the act
of making sense of its content. They are symbols of both theatre and psychology. Bohl fashions a play-within-a-play referring to
the life of an image in construction and deconstruction.
Cotton, Michelle, “Behind the Screens”, Texte Zer Kunst, No. 73, March 2009, Pg, 181
STIFTUNG GRÄSSLIN
KUNSTRAUM GRÄSSLIN MÄNNER FRAUEN
RÄUME FÜR KUNST PORTRAITS FROM THE COLLECTION
13 September 2009 – 20 June 2010
Opening: Saturday, 12 September 2009, 2 pm
Since the inauguration of the KUNSTRAUM GRÄSSLIN in June 2006 in St. Georgen the
mountain town has become established on the international art scene as an important exhibition venue. On an annual basis the Grässlin family presents works from its extensive collection at the KUNSTRAUM GRÄSSLIN and in the off-site RÄUME FÜR KUNST. The focal
points of the Grässlin collection are the 1980s, 1990s and 2000. Following the successful
inaugural exhibition of works by Mike Kelley, Martin Kippenberger and Albert Oehlen in 2006,
the second exhibition focussed on room installations by a younger generation of artists. 2008
saw the much-lauded exhibition of works by Martin Kippenberger, an extensive presentation
of this artist’s work in Germany on the occasion of the large survey exhibitions of his oeuvre in
Los Angeles and New York.
Under the heading “MÄNNER FRAUEN” (Men Women) this year’s presentation is concentrating on the theme of the portrait. The KUNSTRAUM GRÄSSLIN will show works by Günther
Förg, Georg Herold, Reinhard Mucha, Albert Oehlen, Tobias Rehberger, Franz West and
Christopher Williams, which not only comment playfully or critically on the genre, but also
raise conceptual questions. What is the significance or function of the (self-)portrait today?
Can individuality be conveyed through art? How do visual strategies construct or reflect images of women and men?
In addition to painting, sculpture and photography, the exhibition will also present installations
and video works which deal with the issue of portraying people and thereby provide abundant
insight into various portrait strategies. These range from the supposedly faithful representations in Günther Förg’s documentary photography or the pictorial inventions Christopher Williams creates based on borrowings from advertising
STIFTUNG GRÄSSLIN zur Förderung der Kunst
Museumstrasse 2 · D-78112 St. Georgen · Tel. +49 (0) 7724.91 61 805 · Fax +49 (0) 7724.91 61 806 · [email protected]
Vorsitzender Stiftungsrat Karola Kraus · Stellvertretender Stiftungsrat Bärbel Grässlin · SA AZ 16.2214.8 RP Freiburg 27. 12. 2004
Sparkasse Schwarzwald-Baar · BLZ 694 500 65 · KTO 150 939 802
STIFTUNG GRÄSSLIN
photography, via the expressive self-portraits of Albert Oehlen, the psychoanalytical approaches to the emergence of the subject in Franz West’s participatory sculptures, the
questioning of the relationship between individual and society in Georg Herold’s video
installation, to the issue of identity constructions above and beyond mimetic or alienating
portrayals in the abstract-conceptual works of Reinhard Mucha and the sculptures of Tobias Rehberger. The great diversity of expressive forms testifies to the continuous validity
of the portrait in contemporary art as an aesthetic means of endowing and reflecting on
identity.
As in the past, the current presentation at the KUNSTRAUM GRÄSSLIN will again be
complemented by about 20 other RÄUME FÜR KUNST dispersed around town, where
works from the collection relating to the portrait will be shown, by, among others, Kai
Althoff, Georg Baselitz, Henning Bohl, Werner Büttner, Clegg & Guttmann, Axel Hütte,
Martin Kippenberger, Meuser, Markus Oehlen and Cosima von Bonin. The RÄUME FÜR
KUNST, conceived in 1995, involves the use of empty shop space and display windows,
public spaces like the assembly room at the Town Hall or the foyer of the Sparkasse, as
well as the private houses of the Grässlin family members as exhibition venues. So this
year too, a visit to the museum will again become a tour of St. Georgen and the diverse
contexts it provides for experiencing contemporary art.
On a Head's Edge
Manfred Hermes
In the 1980s Albert Oehlen once said that people always became artists for the wrong reasons. The good thing about this remark is the way it can be twisted to possibly exceed by far its original intent. Someone becomes an artist for the wrong reasons,
because the expectations of personal advantage (the need for validation, a glamorous lifestyle, or the desire to give meaning
to things at the highest level) are illusionary and therefore will and must be frequently disappointed. Since “art” is opaque and
profoundly questionable, theartist’s role and function are, too. Whatever triggered the choice may have completely lost its
meaning in just a few years. If, however, one chooses to pursue this profession anyway, another word then comes to the fore:
loyalty. For loyalty is necessary to justify the choice again and again, every day, to give it meaning. Its dimensions are more
modest than the desire for meaning, but perhaps it will lead to self-sustaining movement or work of an individual kind. Thus,
something good can arise, even under the wrong circumstances. Of course, the word “individual” has to be used carefully here,
because, within the context of artistic production, one’s own individual work can only have meaning as long as it is also capable
of recognizing the structural, the legitimate, and the givens within the illusion of these reasons and one’s images of oneself. In
this case the artist would enter snto a dialectic in which everyday actions are completed under the condition of not being fully
aware of all the implications. This dialectic includes other tensile forces-incalculable factors, such as the cycles ofcontent, genre,
and work method and, of course, the commercial, the conceptual, and the institutional environment-in the broadest sense-all
play a crucial role. They not only have to come to terms with their own wrong reasons, but they also determine the space in
which the artist can play, while regulating the recognition of his work. Then, it may very well be that, regardless of whether the
reasons for becoming an artist were night or wrong, that one finds oneself, as an artist, ultimately responsible for what is merely
an elevated kind of interior design.
Does HennIng Bohl’s choice of title allude to these things? Is “Cornet of Horse”, for instance, about the issue of status
in institutionalized art contexts? At first, the works shown in the outer senes of rooms at the Hamburg Kunstverein do not provide any information about this issue. Essentially, we have here a retrospective tour of Bohl’s recent variations on image-based
non-images: door leaves sticking out from a wall (Schneeballe anmalen mit Spruhfarbe [spray painting snowballs]); a group of
wooden panels, full of holes, and attached to clothes racks, and stretcher frames mounted on tripods. Fronts covered in rubberized, skin-colored fabric, with bicycle helmets hanging on them, their backs set with transducers and other sound equipment:
these canvases are simultaneously humanoids, amplifiers, and the leftovers from the performance Reorienting Orientationalism,
with Ei Arakawa and Sergej Tcherepnin. But some of Bohl’s large works also hang here: lengths, strips, and shapes of paper
glued to canvas. Out of their simple, Matisse-like, sharply cut circles, crescents, circular segments, and keen angles, Bohl
created some individualistic emblems a few years ago. Last, but not least, this applies especially to the contact motifs, which
encounter each other at the sharp ends of these shapes, taking aim directly at the corners of the image, or running into the
edges.
The most important element in “Cornet”, however, consists of the groups of various table objects. Chaosium inc. is a
conglomerate of partially bent or buckled surfaces. In Corner of a Cornfield Bohl has once again appropriated his exhibition,
“The ate rT oday” (2008). In the latter the canvases hung down from existing and specially made ceiling structures, as if they
were on a conveyor belt, while in Corner the emphasis is on the mode of attaching the images, so here, the ceiling structures
are isolated, copied, and then turned upside down, “served up on a clean platter.”
Now these older works are linked to the most recent pieces. These are arranged primarily in the inner space at the
Kunstverein, a Russian nesting doll of a white cube. These four-legged objects, assembled out of stretcher frames, fiberboard,
and conical legs whose pointed ends face downward, seem, at first glance, like nonsensical furniture by Memphis, or objects
by the Dusseldorf “model makers.”
Obviously, in this case, the image and its impossibility are confronted and replayed through the “image carrier”in the
most material sense of the phrase. Here, stretcher frames are tilted from the vertical to the horizontal, and thus turned into
the foundation for these furniture-like constructs. Sing frames in this way inevitably recalls Kippenberger’s blasphemous act of
degrading one of Gerhard Richter’s little monochromatic paintings into a tabletop, by attaching four legs to it.) On these frames,
Bohl has put thin chipboard and plywood, some untreated, others laminated or perforated with holes. None of them correspond
in size to the surfaces they are attached to. Since the boards jut out beyond them, they are jammed in between the shanks of
the frames. This creates bulges that underscore the impression of a piece of furniture or a hut, but also put the whole thing into
a state of terse parody, since these constructs are also, up to a certain point, statements about space and illusionism in images.
Colors, patterns, or visual motifs are, by the way, reserved for the conical legs, where idiosyncratic bits of reality or cultural references are brought into play (“Star Wars”). So, one can quite rightly say that these stands make a rather absurd and somehow
obstructed impression. Are we in·the realm of light entertainment here?
Bohl’s laconic works actually do have a distinctively humorous side. Here, it is borne out in the roughness, the strange
appearance of his table objects, but as far as the humor is concerned, many of the titles are also telling enough (Clone Wars,
COMME des GARCONS Socken billig [COMME des GARCONS cheap socks], Button Fruit Salad, Nursery School Teacher).
In an interview a few years ago, Bohl commented on tables, “I started using the tables because of their somewhat doof [dopey,
or to be a bit rude: stupid] sculptural quality.” In this explanation, I was struck by the adjective “doof.” Its round, double vowel
sound reminds me of a series of nice, similar words, such as obtuse, precarious, under-demanding, and drab, as well as their
negations: words such as clever, cerebral, and-more strongly directed toward artistic categories-conceptual. The word “doof”
also definitely encapsulates particular aspects of the way that Bohl produces motifs and signs.
This is certainly true of the frames covered in black rubberized fabric; bungee cords are stretched across them, forming
rhombus shapes and then bicycle helmets are attached to the fabric as visual objects. Bicycle helmets are probably the least
elegant and most ridiculous symbols of urban mobility conceivable, and an expression of a need for safety that is not shared
by many. Bohl has titled these works Frog Substitutes, so the helmets represent frogs. They actually remind me more of brains,
and, therefore, of what these shells are supposed to protect-against whose exaggerated influence Bohlls defending himself
to a certain extent. Considering the obvious representative quality of these objects, one could also claim that they refer to the
characteristics that are ascribed to the brain, and thus they reject cleverness and selfconfident conceptual statements.
It is the above-mentioned pointed cones, great numbers of which are used as table legs in this show, that comprise the
outstanding and exaggerated peak of stupidity. These forms-circle, cone, table-correspond coherently to various earlier, very
different kinds of works, but if bicycle helmets are frogs here, then these objects must be substitutes for horses and therefore
create what is possibly an almost fabulous connection to the title of the exhibition. However, pointed cones are also ice cream
cones, as are “Schultuten” [decorated cardboard cones filled with treats, given to children on their first day of school]. And Bohl
himself intermittently talks of sham references.
All of this, however, makes these table-objects particularly unreliable and vulnerable. “Schultuten”, for instance, have to
do with real-life experiences that are better left out of the art context. Above all, though, these tables are precarious in a specific, engineering-related sense-they simply have no load-bearing capacity and traction. The cones limit contact with the floor
to the smallest possible surface area, the most diminutive points of tangency. That means, in contrast to the contact motifs in
Bohl’s pictures, an act of distancing is performed-and that could also be applied to the connection to the given space or the
institutional framework.
Sprinkling the salt of stupidity into one’s own artistic practice is perhaps not the worst way to wrench the automatic,
the abstract, the pretentious, and the hypostatization from art. Stupidity might also mean holding one’s ground in a state of
uncertainty and risk. Therefore, things must be embarrassing or stupid if one does not want to get stuck in a state of anxiety
and predictability, or to impute one’s activity to an exclusively institutional logic. It is not easy to wrest all of this out of an art
space, which is ambitious and tends to be unreliable and parasitic. Seen in this way, Bohl’s marked reservations can also be
transferred to other circumstances. In contrast to institutional or dogmatic certainty, art products remain ineluctably in a stable
imbalance between the ridiculous and the uninhibited. They have to, because to bear with something, to persist in uncertainty,
is one of the consequences arising from the dialectic of the artist-subject outlined at the start. Bohl’s constructs have become
emblematic of this.
Addendum: It is not really necessary any more to explain exactly who the horse is and what the cornet is, because it’s
possible that none of it has any meaning, anyway. A coincidental find in a compendium of German literature seemed, nevertheless, suddenly as appropriate as only these kinds of discoveries can be: Gottlieb Konrad Pfeffels “Der Komett und das Pferd”
[The Cornet and the Horse]. This fable, written in verse form in 1792, tells the story of a low-ranking officer. He abuses his
horse, and at some point, it rebels against its tormenter. “Max fell. Full of rage, the whinnying colossus trampled him / ‘What are
you doing?’ cried the paladin. /’I’m dancing,’ spoke the steed.” In this case the moral is sufficiently self-explanatory, because
the fable was written at a time when Germany was in one of its rare revolutionary moods.
Bohl, Henning, Cornet of Horse, Distanz: Berlin, October, 2011