Huma Bhabha, Installation View. Courtesy of VeneKlasen/Werner, Berlin

Huma Bhabha
May 2-July 26, 2014
VeneKlasen/Werner
Rudi-Dutschke-Str. 26
Berlin
vwberlin.com

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Amy Lien, Enzo Camacho, Installation. Polyester foam padding, bamboo sticks, clear vinyl, papier-mâché. Courtesy of Mathew Gallery.

Featuring: Amy Lien and Enzo Camacho

Who Do You Love?
May 2 – June 28, 2014
Mathew Gallery
12 Schaperstrasse
Berlin
mathew-gal.de

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The exhibition is a survey of the artist’s works on paper and is the first major exhibition of Höch’s art in Great Britain, bringing together over 100 works from major international collections. The exhibition examines Höch’s career from the 1910’s to the 1970’s—if circumnavigating her prolific array of oil painting and drawing—the exhibition at least focuses on her most remembered output: photo-montage and collage and her works of fantastische kunst.

Höch’s art was often an astute social satire on the female form, and the politics of Europe. The artist’s human condition is resolutely female, and reflects her own experiences. A reflection of the female form, and identity in society, as well as art.

These were figurative abstractions of tension and urgency. A juxtaposition of formal abstract aesthetics and emotional socio-cultural clout—initially reflecting a period of enthusiasm and great change in a post First World War Berlin.

Yet Höch’s art was radical in contrast to the purely formal concerns of the Dadaist movement. The ‘simultaneous muddle of noises’ that the Dada Manifesto called for was discarded by Höch for a certain aesthetic balance, a definite composition, and a narrative structure, often politicized.

This one-woman Dadaist revolution also reflected a more obvious socio-political content and feminist drive, prevalent in the creative party of 1920’s Berlin, eventually to be trampled under booted heel by a ‘mad, inhuman, bestial clique‘—as the artist herself described the Nazis—once she was no longer muted by their tyranny.

In fact the Second World War saw the artist publicly derided for her degenerate works, and she lived out the war in cautious seclusion. A period that saw no public displays of her work, or opinion. Yet her art was spared exhibition in Die Ausstellung Entartete Kunst—the Degenerate Art exhibition of 1937—as many of her peers fled Europe to America to continue the movement.

But it was the compositional harmony of Höch’s work as opposed to the ‘anti-art’ of the Dada aesthetic that may have been the reason for her seeming erasure from Dadaist history. It was in the 1920’s that fellow Dadaists John Heartfield, and George Grosz decried her inclusion in the First International Dada Fair. Also the fact that fellow German Dadaists considered their female peers ‘charming and gifted amateurs’, suggests that left-wing art movements were not spared sexism, even in a progressive Berlin.

Höch was also an artist exploring the contradictions of her own identity, juxtaposed against a society in either post-war ascension or decline, whether in the darkening clouds of a pre-war Berlin with a tableaux of a fluid sexuality and social conscience, or with more than a glimmer of biting satirical wit.

Hannah Hoch, Untitled (From an Ethnographic Museum), 1930. Collage
48.3 x 32.1 cm. Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg. Image courtesy of Maria Thrun.

There are certainly references to the gaze of the viewer and objectification of the female form, and it’s socially disempowering consequences, bringing to mind; ‘The surveying woman is a man, the surveyed woman is a woman’, a notion that Höch would probably agree with, if not the language with which the concept is posited.

The stark nature of racial inequality in a 1930’s Germany was also referenced on several occasions in the artist’s work – a courageous act in the period of the Weimar republic.

There is also an anachronistic tendency to read a feminist agenda when viewing the works – yet the female figures of Höch’s photo-montages often express a knowing place, not only within the composition, but in history, both art history and cultural history; while creating mischief in their own social present.

Höch was not a follower of the strict formalist theory of Dadaism—hers was a detail of arrangement—abstracted social-conceptual imagery—often focusing on the female form and with a political vibrancy – a power to excite an anarchic aesthetic reflecting a period of tumultuous social upheaval.

But post World War Two Höch’s insightful and piercing aesthetic softened into lyrical abstraction. The artist’s anarchic social criticism was worn down by the fear of Nazi oppression—or maybe this was a reflection of a new found social and artistic freedom; her social commentary was quieter and her ‘attacks’ less ferocious.

One of the artist’s final works; ‘Lebensbild (Life Portrait) 1973′, is a complex photo-montage including images of Höch throughout her career. Having lived through one of the most eventful centuries in human history, she embraced the new media of ‘photo-matter’ often using it to comment on the very subjects it had captured.

Amongst the detailed collage is an almost hidden image from the Apollo moon landings and the famous image of ‘Earth Rise’. Höch’s figure is collaged into the image as an almost final act of mischief and a clever narrative of artist as attestor to the world. Human action processed through the eye of the artist as social conscience and political commentator of unmediated expression.

As Höch is not only observing the moon landing but peering over the shoulder of the astronaut, with magnifying glass in hand looking back at, and observing the earth. The most objective view of ourselves in history. A conceit to a lifetime of critical study and manipulation of the photograph, and a modest, almost hidden statement of witness to a lifetime of change, and an artist’s moral obligation.

By Paul Black

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Dutch artist and photographer, Erwin Olaf, attempts to approach himself with personal definition with his series about the city, “A Homage to Berlin.” I tried to understand his artistic vision during my visit at Wagner + Partner, the institution in Berlin where Olaf’s exhibition is shown, by speaking with the artist. His photographs are timeless; they convey a simple message, and an unparalleled aesthetic.

Erwin Olaf is a photographer with a vision. He has quite the impressive resume: exhibitions all over the globe, including Hasted Kraeutler, Museum of Arts in Moscow, and WAGNER + PARTNER in Berlin. The list is endless. However, I would expect nothing less from one of De Grootste Niederlander, or “The Greatest Dutchman,” a public poll he was voted to be on 10 years ago.

While seeing the series for the first time, I recognized the dark, melancholic tonality, the black and brown in almost every picture, and the strong dominance of the showed protagonists. We see children, children in the role of grown ups, even more as decision makers, the guiders, as the beings over the mature human. It feels uncomfortable, frightening, and true. I asked Erwin Olaf why it is children that dictate the photographs. He told me that there was a key moment at an airport, where he understood the power of children in our time. Children guide their parents, they emboss the present, and they own the future as the secret ruler of the world.

What has all this to do with Berlin, you may ask? When you find time to let the photographs sink in, you’ll find all kinds of personal answers.

Placed in the idea of the roaring twenties, the children don’t appear to be naïve or innocent; it may be a symbol for the Germans of that time. The shadows are threatening, and they shrink on with a time of terror. Whether or not this is intentional will remain a mystery, for the Artist wants to allow the spectators to interpret the art on their own. He tells me that he wants to ask questions, not to give answers, and that he wants to stimulate your own ideas as a viewer; it really got me thinking.

This series, composed of about twenty Photographs, is placed in a long gone Berlin. This impression originates almost only through the clothes of the children. One time there is a little girl dressed in a leather dress with fitting gloves, one time it’s a souped-up boy in a custom made suit. We recognize the intention without getting our noses rubbed in it, an art that Erwin Olaf masters like no other.

He has chosen seven special places for this series, including the Free Manson Lodge in Dahlem, and the City Hall of Schöneberg, where Kennedy shouted his famous words “I am a Berliner.“

I asked Mr. Olaf if he, too, is a Berliner, and I find the answer in his past. Fascinated from the city, he traveled here before the wall came down and then again, and again. Sometimes he would come for only a few days, and then return for a few weeks. This time, he stayed for two weeks to give himself the opportunity to understand the city even more, to experience it even deeper. He said this photo series made his bound to Berlin stronger, and he thinks about the option to move here after all. A great success, if you ask me.

Olaf’s photo series was an eye-opening experience for me, as a Berliner. I got to know the city in a new way, a chance to see it in a different perspective. I saw its past that I never experienced, and it felt like smelling the dust of old wood and the scent of the polished leather while looking at his work. I felt like someone was explaining my own city to me, but I was not mad, because I knew that Erwin Olaf understood it very well, something many Artist before tried to do and not only Bowie.

But I want to know more about the work; I want to dig deeper. Is there more than this wonderful homage to the capital of the Germans? What do the old ladies have to say in the photographs? Which meaning do the supporting protagonists have in relation to the shown youth?

Erwin Olaf explained that the elders are embittered, that they feel sorry for their loss of youth. He told me that they are jealous of their pasts, manifested in the child. He said that he pictured the stages of life, all in the setting that is Berlin, but that the kids are always the leading part of it.

What does that tell us about Berlin? I find my very personal answer in the agility of this city, because just like children in this historical settings are the Berliners in their home. The City is old, but its citizens are young.

The renowned artist shows us, once again his view of things with this exhibition: not romanticized, not bloomy, but clear and real as it can be. He succeeds one more time in not revealing what can be only found inside us.

I find my city in these photographs with its historical look and youthful charm, its dark past. I also see homage to the twenties, as well as to the childish dominance, and I recognize the power of youth and possible bitterness of maturity. But most importantly, I understand that all this is Berlin. A City destined to stand forever, on the eternal search for identity and with the constant growing up of its citizens, bound with shadows and darkness. And then I see the genius behind this man, Erwin Olaf, who is able to show all that without making it obvious.

Erwin Olaf is well deserving of the title, Grootste Niederländer, but now I can also say, “He is a Berliner.“

Olaf’s exhibition will be on view until November 16th at Gallery WAGNER + PARTNER, Strausberger Platz 8, 10423 Berlin.

By, Denny Walentin

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