Here are three carefully selected picks from this week’s Berlin Artweek 2017. By chance all of them include plants, refer to organisms and exhibit nature somehow – other connections surely can be found.
Always remember: «The clearest way into the universe is through a forest wilderness» as John Muir put it.
Berlin Artweek 2017 is in full swing and Gerrit Frohne-Brinkmann from Hamburg presents his exhibition «Dr. Perversi» at the recently opened Galerie Noah Klink until 10th of October 2017.
Frohne-Brinkmann who won the New-Positions-Prize of the artfair Art Cologne in 2016 presents an environment which cites waiting rooms of doctor’s offices. He refers to the furniture, the plants and the art usually found in these places of transit. On the wall he hang drawings modeled after the ones which are applied to patient’s bodies before plastic surgery and on the shelves he arranged sculptures of carnivorous plants made from clay. (I already mentioned before that clay is heavily trending again.) ⠀
The almost symmetric drawings bring to mind the images of the notorious and controversial Rorschach test used in psychological treatments which tries to analyze the patient through his or her perception of given inkblots images which are a priori without any given message. ⠀
While the Rorschach test is used to examine a person’s psyche, working with clay is also used a form of therapy. It is said that this non-verbal and playfull method has a balancing effect and strengthens the self-confidence and autonomy through the expression of feelings. ⠀
Frohne-Brinkmann combines the targeted perfection of optional beauty surgeries with the decay of the carnivorous plants to comment in a nonchalant way on the phase of a young artist in which he works constantly on his inner and outer personality while waiting until he gets called up, because the «artworld will see him now» – and one way or another gets swallowed up by it. •
[Click on the images to get to the gallery mode.]