We are very pleased to present the first solo exhibition by Mathias Deutsch at the Drawing Room. The exhibition title Brushcleaning Landscapes refers to the genesis of the works in the 70 x 50 cm format. Deutsch had initially worked on paintings in oil on canvas and, during the painting process, brushed out his brushes, which were covered with paint residue, on papers. When he noticed that these smears revealed shadowy landscapes and technical units, he began to add to these forms, which had arisen by chance, with the aid of the brush, spatula and other mechanical tools in order to consciously add further forms and open up new levels of reference and associations.

Tender Last Sounds IV, 2020
Oil on paper
70 x 50 cm

Courtesy: The artist and Drawing Room, Hamburg
Photo: Mathias Deutsch

Exhibition text > PDF

We are very pleased to present the second solo exhibition by Katharina Hinsberg (*1967 in Karlsruhe) entitled "Points Coupés". Line and cut characterise the work of the artist, who is one of the most important conceptual draughtswomen of the present day. Through such diverse techniques as cutting, drilling, marking with fingers or pen, Hinsberg questions the conditions, possibilities and references of the genre of drawing and its effect on space. The exhibition in the Drawing Room juxtaposes works from the work groups Ajourés, Lacunae and Netze with ones from the more recent work complexes Perseiden and Schraffen as well as the recently created small sculptures made of beads on wire. All of Hinsberg's works are characterised by the fact that they demand a concentrated way of seeing that allows the viewer to participate in the fragility and poetry, spontaneity and precision of their pictorial worlds.

Schraffen, 2021
Colour pencil on paper, cut out
96 x 72,2 cm

Courtesy: The artist and Drawing Room, Hamburg
Photo: Katharina Hinsberg, Neuss

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We are very pleased to present the first solo exhibition of the French photographer Jean-Louis Garnell (* 1954 in Brittany) in Hamburg. The artist demonstrates to us the dissolution of subject and motif, the dissolution of the genre itself. Using the means of photography and digital media, he attempts to locate the world, the present and man's relationship to space and time, to the material and the virtual. His artistic concept includes the use of classical pictorial genres such as landscape, portrait, interior and still life. At the same time, however, he also uses abstract forms, which he derives from a specially programmed software and develops for his visual language. In his works, the artist explores opposites: System and chaos, the natural and the artificial, reality and representation, the material and the physical.

Le bout de la table #26 1998-2011, 2019
Pigment Ink Jet Print on Baryta Paper on Dibond
40 x 60 cm

Courtesy: The artist and Drawing Room, Hamburg
Photo: Jean-Louis Garnell, Paris

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For her first exhibition oto & kawa at the Drawing Room, Asana Fujikawa was inspired by a Japanese Shintō myth. Superstition and religion, fear and desire, heroism and monsters play a role in it - especially with regard to the influence of water or the sea on man. The artist draws from the long ceramic tradition of Japan, draws and etches and composes her own texts. In the process, all the components fit organically into one another without a fixed chronology. In this way, new cross-media narratives emerge that are not closed, but liquid and permeable. All the figures, be they heroes and heroines, monsters or containers of souls, come from a coherent cosmos and reappear again and again in her work.

Asana Fujikawa
Soul container in spring 2022
Ceramic, glazed
15 x 11 x 5 cm

Courtesy: The artist and Drawing Room, Hamburg
Photo: Asana Fujikawa, Hamburg

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In her work, the Berlin-based artist Johanna Jaeger (* 1985 in Heidelberg) makes time and light as the main constituents of the photographic process a conceptual and motivic theme. To this end, she has developed a characteristic pictorial language that revolves around fluid ephemera such as clouds, colour gradients, and the processual dissolution of form; all this ties in with phenomena of light and exposure and also addresses the sedimentation of the solid as a photographic metaphor. In her first solo exhibition clouds & pebbles at the Drawing Room, Johanna Jaeger constructs a framework with the two installation works, sky piece and river pebble (horizontal split_1-∞) (both 2021), thus literally proclaiming the exhibition a "picture space". From this, she unfolds a field of tension for her photographic tableaus as well.

Johanna Jaeger
Blue swirl / inverse fall, 2020
each pigment print
each 29,6 x 23,5 cm

Courtesy: The artist and Drawing Room, Hamburg
Photo: Johanna Jaeger, Berlin

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In his work, sound and media artist Claus Böhmler (1939 – 2017) analysed the media and the changes in reception and perception that accompanied its development. Our exhibition project, which was conceived in close cooperation with the Böhmler estate, concentrates on the “TYPOGRAMME – Schreibmaschine” (Typogram - Typewriter) series of works. In these critical and humorous drawings with text, produced in 1968 and reflecting everyday life, Böhmler uses a typewriter as a drawing instrument. His later artistic strategies and concepts can already be found in this early series of works. The exhibition and an accompanying catalogue (published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König) will examine the important aspect of how effective language is as a medium of visual communication in Böhmler’s work, and will bring initial insight into its significance to his interdisciplinary oeuvre to a wider audience for the first time.

Claus Böhmler
Kommunikation (Communication), 1968
Drawings with text: Handwritten and typed words
29.7 x 21 cm

Courtesy: Böhmler Estate and Drawing Room, Hamburg
Photo: Helge Mundt, Hamburg

Exhibition text > PDF

The concept “panta rhei” which goes back to Heraclitus, or Ovid’s “omnia mutantur, nihil interit” (Ovid, Metamorphoses: XV, 165) describe a significant aspect of Pablo Schlumberger’s exhibition in the Drawing Room. What is flowing, what has changed over the course of time, and what indeed remains as it is? These types of questions could occur to exhibition visitors when they view the seven hybrids of photography, digital drawing and sculpture in the current series of work “Total Aberration”, the painting on men’s shirts, and the three sculptural works. The pictures of a faintly recognizable Euro-Manikin sculpture were taken by the artist in the summer of 2017 on his ‘Grand Tour’, using a disposable underwater camera in Neapolitan fountains and in the Bay of Naples. The photographs, which in their blurriness call to mind the aesthetic of underwater expeditions by treasure-seeking divers, allow wide-ranging interpretations about the depicted subject’s exact location. Schlumberger invites us to take a visual dive into liquid worlds, which on closer observation open a second pictorial level and reveal his artistic thinking in the interstitial spaces.

Pablo Schlumberger
TOTAL ABERRATION 8, 2020
UV print with liquid gloss finish on Alu-Dibond
90 x 60 x 2 cm

Courtesy: The artist and Drawing Room, Hamburg
Photo: Helge Mundt, Hamburg

List of exhibits > PDF

In our exhibition project "Odyssey – an Exile Collage", the characteristics of Marseille as a place of temporary refuge and reservoir of the intellectual elite of Europe between 1933 and 1942 are expressed through a film by Maya Schweizer, a wall piece by Olaf Metzel, and a reference to the Heinrich Heine Memorial by Danish sculptor Louis Hasselriis from 1891.

Olaf Metzel's wall sculpture We Refugees, 2020 features a ground-breaking text by the Jewish-German philosopher Hannah Arendt. Maya Schweizer's film The Dying Soldier of Les Milles, 2014 focuses on the memorial Le Camp des Milles - a former internment camp and later a Vichy / German concentration camp of World War II in an old brickworks in Aix-en-Provence. At the same time, the camera looks at the monument of a wounded soldier dedicated to soldiers who died in the two World Wars and the Algerian War and at the game of pétanque played by the village community at his feet.

Both works deal with the disrupted fate of humans forced to flee from their native countries in multi-layered ways that merge the past and the present.

That way, "Odyssey– an Exile Collage" aims to raise the public’s awareness for patterns of discrimination and persecution from the past still relevant today. We hope that, by learning from the past, future generations will strive to show more solidarity towards human beings segregated as minorities.

The project is initiated by Drawing Room Hamburg, Raum für Kunst e.V. Hamburg and Produzentengalerie Hamburg

Supported by
Behörde für Kultur und Medien Hamburg
Herbert und Elsbeth Weichmann-Stiftung

Maya Schweizer
The Dying Soldier of Les Milles, 2014
HDV, 16/9, 13 min, colour, sound

Courtesy of the artist and Drawing Room, Hamburg
Photo: Maya Schweizer, Berlin

Short CV's of the artists > PDF

The exhibition series “The Body of Drawing” is dedicated to the broad territory of drawing and graphics. Thereby perspectives shall be considered going beyond the generally accepted and often biased approaches in which ‘line’ dominates. Not least, artistic positions distinguished by an interest in volumes and in the corporeal will also be examined. The direct traces produced by the physical action of drawing can allude to the body of the artist. The human body also comes into play as pictorial representation.
“The Touch of Density” – the first exhibition of this series at the Drawing Room – focuses upon a third aspect: the ‘body’ of the drawing, which consolidates as a physical presence on or out of the pictorial surface.

The exhibition series will continue in April in oqbo – Raum für Bild und Ton, in Berlin (www.oqbo.de). Further stops of the exhibition are planned for Zurich and Montpellier.

Nora Schattauer
untitled, 2017
salt solutions on chromatography paper
80 x 60 cm

Courtesy: The artist and Drawing Room, Hamburg
Nora Schattauer, Cologne

List of exhibits > PDF

The internationally renowned artist Jan Albers is a crossover artist who works with many different media to explore the limits of the art form of painting. His works swing between image and object – between abstract sculptured painting and painted sculpture. Albers employs naturalistic and industrial materials such as wood, ceramic, marble, steel, bronze, concrete and polystyrene. He arranges these ‘raw materials’ into strictly formal structures, geometric grids, and reliefs, but breaks these up through techniques such as sawing, etching, welding, chiselling or pressing, thus negating his own materials. Thereby he creates intriguing, powerful pictorial objects which strike a balance between order, chaos and emptiness. His a priori non-objective works always recall visual experiences from nature, however, or from the anthropogenically influenced environment. They evoke coral reefs and blazing flames or – seen from a bird’s-eye perspective – dystopian cityscapes, time-ravaged buildings of Modernism or violent modifications of the earth's surface. His wall pieces and reliefs testify to the beauty that lies in the destruction of an existing order.

Jan Albers
breAkingbAdbAd, 2018
Beton
40 x 30 x 20 cm

Courtesy: The artist and VAN HORN, Düsseldorf, Drawing Room, Hamburg
Photo: Jan Albers, Düsseldorf

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The sculptor and installation artist Mariella Mosler (* 1962 in Oldenburg) operates with her work on the boundary between autonomous sculpture and site-specific interior ornamentation. In 1997 she was represented at documenta X in Kassel with a ground relief of quartz sand in the Zwehrenturm of the Fridericianum. In her second exhibition KNOT FOLLIES in Drawing Room, Mosler shows new three-dimensional neon works that, in continuation of the artist’s examination of ornament, deal with the topology of mathematical knot models and float in space as a complex curved trace of light. The neon objects are supplemented and spatially expanded by new mirror works and collages. From the oscillation between repetition and variation, Mosler develops a game of meanings and attributions that never quite works out, leaving us with enduring mysteries.

Mariella Mosler
Sea Change, 2019
varnish, leaf aluminium on crystal mirror
200 x 65 cm

Courtesy: The artist and Drawing Room, Hamburg
Photo: Mariella Mosler, Hamburg

List of exhibits > PDF

Hayley Tompkins (*1971, Leighton Buzzard) works in the media of painting, drawing and installation. She uses everyday objects such as knives, branches, chairs, plastic containers or mobile phones as the surfaces for her paintings. She often combines these with photographs found on the Internet, or painted stretcher bars that are covered with textiles, thus assembling subtle installations which accentuate the process of observing and experiencing space. In her artistic practice, Tompkins uses the mimetic qualities of paint and painterly gesture to interpret everyday objects. She seeks new possibilities for testing painting's transformative potential, in order to achieve an equilibrium between an object’s painted existence and its physical one.

For her second exhibition in Drawing Room, Tompkins has created a new series of small, loose acrylic paintings on paper, an assemblage, the stool entitled ‘LB’, and new Digital Light Pools. The thoroughly painterly treatment of the latter is reminiscent of abstract painting traditions such as Pointillism, COBRA or Art Informel, although with their synthesis of poured colour and recognisable brush marks, each is capable of creating its own, very individual mood.

Hayley Tompkins
Digital Light Pool IV, 2019
acrylic on plastic tray
33,7 x 31,2 x 2,5 cm

Courtesy: The artist, The Modern Institute, Glasgow and Drawing Room, Hamburg
Photo: Helge Mundt, Hamburg

List of exhibits > PDF

Christian Haake’s formally reduced objects, carefully constructed and multi-layered to the last detail, lead a shimmering existence between sculpture, painting and drawing. Produced using industrial production methods and at first glance they look like architectural fragments. The decisive impetus for his works, however, came from a voyage by train; he was most struck by the view out the window as the landscape raced by, its contours and colours melting together into an “after-image”. This grey area between remembered image and imagination forms the basis for his work. In every piece Haake investigates, as Stephan Berg aptly wrote, “the fine gap in the difference, which runs between layers. The goal is not to confirm the correlation between reality and perception, but instead to subtly and poetically destabilize it.”

Christian Haake
cone, 2016
wood, varnish, plastic
42 x 29,7 cm

Courtesy: The artist and Drawing Room, Hamburg
Photo: Christian Haake, Bremen

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In his works, the artist Manuel Frolik, born 1979 in Vogtland and now living and working in Dresden, poses questions of authenticity and authorship, and plays with our preconceptions about originals and forgeries. His process-oriented works are based on the appropriation and defamiliarization of "found footage", or rather of perfectly detailed reproductions of hyper-realistic or amorphous sculptural figures and objects.

Manuel Frolik
Pontederia cordata 1897 (Herbarium Dresdense), 2018
Digitalprint under acrylic glass
75 x 45 cm

Courtesy: The artist and Drawing Room, Hamburg
Photo: Manuel Frolik, Dresden

List of exhibits > PDF

In her painting practice, Anke Völk is interested in aspects of surface, and of the dissolution of limits. She works with iridescent and metallic pigments, which she applies in countless layers on (newsprint) paper, canvas, mdf or an aluminium ground. Thereby, imperfections and the surface of the painting ground play an important role in her artistic technique. Flaws and small irregularities supply the texture of the artistic process; they provide orientation, and influence the work’s expressive content. During the creation and layering process, the artist consciously inserts such imperfections to visually explore how far these residual, visible traces point out that which, although missing, is still inherently present. The imperfections are traces of the painting process and belong to the finished image – just as the work’s other parameters, and its colours do as well.

Anke Völk
Untitled (Metallic Blue/Purple), 2017
Acrylic, cardboard on canvas
90 x 70 cm

Courtesy: The artist and Drawing Room, Hamburg
Photo: Bernd Borchardt, Berlin

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With his cryptic series NULL HYPOTHESIS, Polish photographer Jan Cieślikiewicz creates a study in randomness. The name of his 16 part series derives from a hypothesis posited across scientific disciplines, which asserts that the link between two phenomena is random – the goal of the researcher is to disprove the null hypothesis and show that there is indeed a real, measurable link. In the series, Cieślikiewicz shows a range of apparently unrelated scenes, its title hinting at the difficulty, even impossibility, of proving a link between all of them. His work has an intriguing quality of timelessness and placelessness about it, to the extent that his images look as if they had been taken in an imaginary distant future, or a distant past, or even on a totally different planet. In an interview with LensCulture, the artist describes the challenges of our ‘post truth’ era: “I don’t think humanity as a whole can accept and genuinely come to terms with fundamental randomness and uncertainty, the lack of absolutes. At least not this edition of humanity, maybe the next one: Humanity 2.0…
Accepting this view of reality means letting go of everything. That’s a pretty scary concept, not having anything to hold on to, given the vastness of our life experiences. But I think an imaginary world, where we accept this idea as a given, would be a better one. Fewer opinions would mean less conflict. Less attachment would mean less pain. Personally, I’ve accepted all these things rationally. Emotionally, with my heart: that’s a lot harder. But I’m working on it.“

Jan Cieślikiewicz, Null Hypothesis, 2017
Archival Pigment Print

Courtesy: Jan Cieślikiewicz, New York and Drawing Room, Hamburg
Photo: Jan Cieślikiewicz, New York

Rona Kobel immerses reality in innocent white. With the aid of fine tableware that attempts elegantly to elude the explosiveness of everyday political events, the artist wants, as it were, to spit in our soup, to oversalt the food, and to ruin our appetite. War, terrorism and displacement, Islamism and right-wing extremism, Trump, Putin, Erdogan, and Brexit; everything is on the table, or rather in and on the dishes. In her current series of works, Kobel deals with our collective indolence in facing these pressing crises, and provocatively questions the stability and resistance of democracy and freedom in our world. A key work is Kobel's centrepiece 'Prop it, don’t drop it' (Civilization Bowl), which the viewer cannot simply click to close, or turn the page on, being thereby quickly able to put it out of mind, but must instead endure directly confronting it – an ambiguity reflected on the level of production aesthetics in the contrast between the fleeting instantaneousness of the underlying (media-) image, and the protracted process of porcelain production.

Rona Kobel, Prop it, don’t drop it, 2018 (Detail)
Porcelain, hand painted

Courtesy: Rona Kobel, Berlin and Drawing Room, Hamburg
Photo: Trevor Good, Berlin

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Thomas Judisch (*1981 in Waren / Müritz, Germany) steers our gaze to the firm reality of life of the “small, precious things” of the everyday world, and, with his work, puts a key for comprehending the world in its quite incidental beauty into our hands. One can view his works, which he has often presented as interventions in the museum context, with a twinkle in one’s eye, since the artist cultivates a playful, ironic handling of the material. In his works, nothing is as it appears. He skilfully plays the keyboard of optical illusions and art historical references and invites going on a parcours through our day-to-day world.

Thomas Judisch, Herakles von Hellersdorf, 2016
Concrete and steel

Courtesy: Thomas Judisch and Drawing Room, Hamburg
Photo: Thomas Judisch, Hamburg

List of exhibits > PDF

In her multimedia works, Maya Schweizer interweaves images, sound and text to create subtle contemporary analyses that always have a historic element or a concrete relationship to a collectively remembered location. Through the process of layering, the artist produces complex superimpositions of different levels of time, place and perception.

In her film “A Tall Tale”, presented at the Berlinale 2017 in Forum Expanded, the artist merges the insightful exploration of a 13th century Irish castle ruin and its surroundings with a fictive level —the world of ghost stories. At the very beginning, the voice of Orson Welles invites us to listen to a “short story, straight from the haunted land of Ireland”: Billowy waters, croaking frogs, tree silhouettes, raucous crows, cracks in ruins, door knobs creaking as if moved by an invisible hand or the sound of horses’ hooves trigger associations with the “Tales of Mystery and Imagination” by E. A. Poe and film adaptations of literature such as Laurence Olivier’s “Hamlet”. With her spectacular ride through the history of film noir, Schweizer takes us on a sensual and extrasensory journey through a world of ruins and film ruins, hence at the same time celebrating the history of cinema.

Maya Schweizer, A Tall Tale, 2017
Filmstill (Horse)

Courtesy: Maya Schweizer, Berlin and Drawing Room, Hamburg

List of exhibits > PDF

In its multi-media works, which take a critical approach to institutions, the artist collective Jochen Schmith (Lichtwark Award holder 2017) illustrates the role of the artist and other protagonists in the art market. Against the background of the conversation piece genre, which became popular in England in the 18th century, showing a group of middle class family members or friends in interior rooms, Jochen Schmith uses subtle, site-specific interventions to show the relationship between private and public space in the Drawing Room, between art and commercialisation, between authorship, the appropriation of artistic identity and the luxury consumer goods industry.

The result is a comprehensive presentation that makes a diverse impact, awakening very different associations with the “art business” in the viewer.

Linda McCue, Doris, 2012, oil on canvas, 150 x 120 cm

Courtesy: Linda McCue, Galerie Vera Munro and Drawing Room, Hamburg
Photo: Marcia Breuer, Hamburg

List of exhibits > PDF

In the exhibition „I´m a Stranger Here Myself “ Berlin-based artist Jenni Tischer presents cap sculptures, wearable caps and works on paper. On a formal level, the caps are imprints of heads and literally allow the wearer „a view inside“. On a semantic level, Tischer reflects on the emergence of caps in urban public space and brings to light the way in which caps connect subculture, resistance and at the same time symbolize a commoditized globally produced sameness. Jenni Tischer refers to the book “Strangers to Ourselves“ by psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva which presents the notion of strangeness within the self as a premise to accept strangeness in the outside. The grid-displays made by the artist reflect on digital strategies built on algorithms that are producing normative statements.

Jenni Tischer, STRANGER TO MYSELF, 2017

Courtesy: Jenni Tischer and Drawing Room, Hamburg
Photo: Jenni Tischer, Berlin

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Frank Maier, SPLATTER, 2016, acrylic on nettle, enameled wooden box,
frame lath, 58 x 43,5 x 5.5 cm

Courtesy: Frank Maier and Drawing Room, Hamburg
Photo: Frank Maier, Berlin

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Reality is her material. Using the term “Dirty Minimal”, the Hamburg-based conceptual artist, photographer and sculptor Almut Linde developed her own interpretation of US Minimal Art as far back as the end of the 1980s. “Dirty Minimal” stands for the reduced formal language of Minimal Art—which Linde frees from its aesthetic self-referencing, transferring it into an everyday context. Linde intervenes in existing structures, challenges familiar processes and highlights the role of the individual within social systems. With her work, she breaks with stereotypical perceptions and prejudices and as a result she enables new perspectives on many areas of our life.

The exhibition Radical Beauty at the Drawing Room shows works arising from actions with people in existential spaces, based on three themes (military, human trafficking and deprived social areas). In the context of a long-term collaboration with the German Armed Forces, for example, the artist had soldiers fire at glass frames on command. Four of the resulting works will be shown under the title of DIRTY MINIMAL #33.2.20-23 – BULLET ACTION PAINTING/MACHINE GUN. Linde’s media-reflexive works demonstrate her interest in sociological-political contexts and present a form of art that has a social and hence political core as its goal. This never appears shallow, illustrative or merely anecdotal but remains hard, radical and indigestible in its beauty.*

Almut Linde, DIRTY MINIMAL #32.2.23 – BULLET ACTION PAINTING / MACHINE GUN, 2005, glass frame

Courtesy: Almut Linde and Drawing Room, Hamburg
Photo: Almut Linde, Hamburg

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The group exhibition Imi Knoebel | Rolf Rose | Henrik Eiben. Colour and Form presents a wide range of non-representational works on paper, in the form of series or open-ended alignments. Something that all three artists have in common is their reduced vocabulary of forms, which is determined by colour. Areas of colour are interwoven and layered and define the space on the paper with their rhythm, density and tension. For his works from the series Gartenbilder / Garden Pictures, Imi Knoebel has painted sheets of plastic foil with acrylic paint and then cut shapes out of them by hand, using a cutter, arranging them on cardboard as a collage. Knoebel does not treat the garden as a (traditional) motif, as Max Liebermann did, for example, in his garden paintings, but as an abstract composition made up of seemingly arbitrarily arranged lines or strip structures, which can vary “infinitely”. The watercolours by Rolf Rose—three horizontal layers of colour gradations applied with broad brushstrokes—also trigger landscape associations in the viewer. However, Rose is primarily interested in a simple, harmonious and recurrent gesture, which corresponds to the watery, fluid state of the medium of watercolour and which takes shape through the movements of his hand and the paintbrush. The inexhaustible variations created by the interplay of colour and form also play a significant role in Henrik Eiben’s watercolours. His compositions of parallel undulating or interwoven lines and areas of colour that have been “breathed” delicately onto the paper, draw on Knoebel’s rhythmic “blocks of colour”. However despite the light and transparent nature of the paint application, the formal vocabulary of the works is also reminiscent of the volume and plasticity of his own sculptures and wall objects.

Rolf Rose, Untitled, 2003, watercolour

Courtesy of the Artist and Drawing Room, Hamburg
Photo: Helge Mundt, Hamburg

List of exhibits > PDF

In her works on paper, Katharina Hinsberg (*1967, Karlsruhe) examines the visual and conceptual scope of the medium of drawing. Hinsberg’s works have an explosive quality, as they break with the familiar conception we have of drawing as something that remains on the surface. The starting point for her work is the line, which Hinsberg cuts out of the surface and—defined by its relationship to the surrounding lines and empty spaces—transports from the two-dimensional to the three-dimensional plane and subsequently into the experiential space of the viewer.

As a result of this process of transformation, the drawn line becomes a cut line and the paper, depending on the cutting technique, becomes an open membrane, a grid or simply a frame for the “elevated” mesh of lines, which incorporates the surrounding wall as an image carrier.

Diaspern, 2004, 4-part work, graphite on paper, cut out (part I)

Courtesy of the artist and Drawing Room, Hamburg
Photo: Achim Kukulies, Düsseldorf

List of exhibits > PDF

The Hamburg-based artist Henrik Eiben (*1975, Tokyo) has created new works for the exhibition "dakar" in the Drawing Room, which at first glance can be associated with the term minimalism. Yet despite the obvious references to US Minimal Art, Eiben’s reliefs and watercolours differ from the uncompromising, formal arrangements by Carl Andre, Donald Judd and Sol LeWitt. His clear surfaces made from stretched fabric, painted steel or coloured acrylic glass are not
stringent, flawless compositions but instead also always prompt a
moment of slight confusion and subtle irony – a slight twist or touch of colour tips the precision of the geometric construction off balance.

With his critical examination of the formal language of Minimal Art, Henrik Eiben playfully succeeds in creating multi-layered works that oscillate between sculpture and painting and at the same time
emanate a strong sense of effortlessness.

Henrik Eiben, Louis, 2013
varnish, watercolour, ice sticks

Courtesy of the artist and Drawing Room, Hamburg
Photo: Holger Niehaus, Hamburg

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The Hamburg-based Katja Aufleger (*1983 in Oldenburg) interlaces different methods and forms of representation in her works, which highlight and critically examine current social trends or systems in operation. The exhibition Show focuses on Aufleger’s most recent group of works, which consists of numerous variations of an oversized necklace, brandishing the word EGO.

In this year’s exhibition of her work at the Kunstverein Hamburg, the first "EGO-necklace" was part of a systematic constellation in which Aufleger ironically analysed the relationship between the object, art institution and viewer.

For the opening at the Drawing Room Aufleger will stage an “EGO fashion show” with two performers showcasing 120 EGO variations in neon colours and a combination of simple and precious materials, thus holding a mirror up to us as viewers and illustrating the tension-filled relationship between a seductive surface and social-critical content, playing desire off against irritation.

Katja Aufleger, # EGO, 2015
Brass, plastic, cotton

Courtesy of the artist and Drawing Room, Hamburg
Photo: Katja Aufleger, Hamburg

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Miriam Cahn (* 1949 in Basel) established a canon of recurring motifs very early on: people, houses, animals, plants and landscapes that oscillate between the figurative and the abstract. Her colours are magical and the works seem to glow from within. Yet they frequently have an eerie and threatening subtext. Cahn’s work is politically loaded – for example in 1992 she critically explored the theme of the Balkan War and the very topical subjects of flight and displacement. The exhibition “Creature” focuses on painting and drawing with a political background, such as Krieg (war), Denkender Soldat (thinking soldier) and Sarajevo. Animals and flowers are also visible, which according to the artist are innocent because they do not take sides. With her plea for everything living, Miriam Cahn has produced a deeply humanist work.

Miriam Cahn, blumendenken, 17+18.07.2003
Oil on canvas, 87 x 130 cm

Courtesy of the artist, Drawing Room, Hamburg and Galerie Jocelyn Wolff, Paris.
Photo: François Doury

List of exhibits > PDF

Mariella Mosler (* 1962 in Oldenburg) became internationally renowned with her space-filling, geometrically-aligned floor reliefs made from quartz sand, which were on show in different venues including the documenta X in Kassel. The artist works with ephemeral materials such as fruit gums, sugar or tinsel, as well as traditional materials such as bronze and silver, experimenting with a wide range of material aggregate states.

For many years now, Mosler has dedicated herself to the ornament and its dynamic between opulence and minimalism, presenting it as both a structuring and open network. The exhibition in the Drawing Room presents a section from the huge range of her ornamental forms, including drawings, mirror works and hair objects. In Mariella Mosler’s work the ornament has discarded its service role – the genesis and structure of its interconnectivity has become the main topic. By tracing the artistically interwoven lines, a similarly playful energy is unleashed in the viewer as was present during the production process.

Mariella Mosler, One Day Drawing, 2013/14
Ink on transparent paper

Courtesy of the artist, Drawing Room, Hamburg. Foto: Christoph Irrgang

List of exhibits > PDF

In Jenni Tischer’s work, awarded the renowned Baloise Art Prize in the sector “Art Statements” at Art Basel in 2013, the materials and artistic vocabulary of minimalist sculpture encounters the practice and history of textiles. Her objects, most of which are based on elementary geometric shapes, deal with “typically female” handicraft techniques such as embroidery, sewing or weaving, transforming them in the art context. The tools used to work the textiles, such as needles, thread, fabric, looms or spindles, hence lose their intended purpose – the process of working on them is elevated to a visibly artistic element.

The exhibition title “Pin Down” refers to the production of textile objects, the act of pinning them together. At the same time it calls on the viewer to decipher, or “pin down” the abstract level of reference behind the aesthetic-formal approach with regard to social systems.

Jenni Tischer, Making Code III, 2015

Courtesy of the artist, Drawing Room, Hamburg and Krobath Wien/Berlin. Photo: Helge Mundt

List of exhibits > PDF

The Glasgow-based artist sees, interprets and reconstructs the world around her through the eyes of a painter. However, she uses everyday objects, which others would not have considered worthy of painting, such as mobile phones, chairs or small branches, to create her abstract paintings.

In the work series Digital Light Pools that she began in 2013 on the occasion of the Venice Biennale, Tompkins further explores the scope of her medium. A watery mixture of acrylic paint is poured into transparent plastic bowls and gently panned from side to side – the result is the crystallization of astonishing, glowing colours in amorphous shapes that are reminiscent of light, fire, water or earth.

For the exhibition in the Drawing Room, Tompkins has produced a series of new objects and Digital Light Pools with a hyperreal quality, achieved through the use of heightened polychrome colouring “…all in a multitude of colours, as if in Technicolor”. Thanks to Hayley Tompkins, our everyday life will ultimately switch into full-colour mode.

Hayley Tompkins, No Title, 2015

Courtesy of the artist, Drawing Room, Hamburg and The Modern Institute/Toby Webster Ltd, Glasgow. Photo: Helge Mundt

List of exhibits > PDF

riffs palaces ploughshares, 2014

Works by Sabine Hornig dissolve the boundaries between photography, sculpture and installation. Hornig’s most famous work worldwide is the windows series she has been developing since 1995, and which began as actual constructed interventions in gallery spaces. To create these images she photographed display windows, using mundane and chance elements within generally empty urban spaces as her starting point. She uses layering of inner and outer space on the windowpane’s surface to create a complex puzzle out of view, vista and reflection; within this puzzle spatial levels also encounter levels of time. The art historian Hans Belting formulated this in the exhibition catalogue Sabine Hornig. Through the Window on the occasion of her exhibition at the Pinakothek der Moderne 2011/12: “What is in front is no longer separated from what is behind, but rather they are present together.” Hornig’s work represents an unconventional contribution to photography, by uniting the genres of picture and object.

Einfallendes Licht / Spilled Light, 2014

The beauty of Melissa Kretschmer's work lies in the deft placement of geometric planes and the subtle interplay of varying hues of natural wood interspersed with black spaces and stark, charcoal gray lines. The process of building up and reducing top layers of the bee's wax gives them both depth and a subtle luminosity, while graphite lines add unique character and provide a focal point. Even though the materials and compositions appear similar, one does not get an impression of production line repetitiveness. The interaction of light and shadow stimulates the imagination and gives each piece a life of its own.

Strait, 2014

Beeswax, silk and sheets of paper are some of the materials used in the exhibition Small Is Beautiful at Hamburg’s Drawing Room. Consisting of works such as the multi-layered material collages by Melissa Kretschmer and paintings on silk by Matti Braun, the objects in exhibition show an emphasis on the resources of everyday life while at the same time marking a return to the human scale. Resisting the tendencies of our time towards instantaneous communication, what the exhibited positions have in common is an explicate concern for the analogies between artwork and the objects of the everyday.