Maurice Wald
current exhibitions
woolworth at 3021 Project SpaceBRUTALISM at Kornversuchsspeicher
work
woolworthcollaborative
Human Intelligence Task // Neurons in the Machine with Juan Felipe Medina & Paula LondonoClosed Loop / Scrying Mirror with
Felix Ansmann
Getting Away With Being an Amateur with Felix Ansmann
I Am Everybody, I Am Everybody with Marque-Lin & Felix Ansmann
image.gen with Felix Ansmann
Studien with Felix Ansmann
cv
about
Maurice Wald
current exhibitions
woolworth at 3021 Project SpaceBRUTALISM at Kornversuchsspeicher
work
woolworth
collaborative
Closed Loop / Scrying Mirror withFelix Ansmann
Human Intelligence Task // Neurons in the Machine with Juan Felipe Medina & Paula Londono
Getting Away With Being an Amateur with Felix Ansmann
I Am Everybody, I Am Everybody with Marque-Lin & Felix Ansmann
image.gen with Felix Ansmann
Studien with Felix Ansmann
cv
about
BRUTALISM
at Kornversuchsspeicher
Dec 02, 2023
at Kornversuchsspeicher
Dec 02, 2023
BRUTALISM at Kornversuchsspeicher
02.12.2023
BRUTALISM is thrilled to present within the raw concrete walls of the Kornversuchsspeicher new and existing work by Felix Ansmann, Jessie Darnell, Mary Clare Pelch and Maurice Wald.
The term brutalism originates from the use of raw concrete - beton brut - by architect and painter Le Corbusier. Le Corbusier coined the term beton brut in 1952 while the construction of his most famous building of the Unité d’Habitation typology - the Unité d’Habitation in Marseille. In brutalism the raw expression of the material that derived from modernism became accompanied with a textural and (con-)structural notion. The four invited artists each display a unique position towards material, texture and structure.
For Pelch’s new sculptural work the raw concrete becomes an expression of time rather than space - opposing the material’s attributes of constructing. Neither casted nor chiseled, there is no rawness or brut(ality), but a fragility, defenselessness and on the beholder forced urge for protection contained within the hardened postures of the two rodent-like sculptures that compose her exhibited work The last rodent and The second to last rodent. The first known mammal species - the Morganucodontids - exchanged the protective eggshell with nurturing. The exposed elements of infrastructure became the interiors; or a cradle.
The subject of Darnell‘s work derives from personal photo ads in 70’s sexual contact books. The amateur quality of the photographs points back to a time less cognizant of the camera’s gaze, giving each image a greater sense of isolation. The objects and interiors within the frame become signifiers - a plant, a cross necklace, a patterned curtain - while the identities of the women are anonymized by their contact numbers (TEXAS A-7565-C, OHIO D-4184-F). These women smile, obscure their faces, and pose awkwardly; desperate for connection. The subjects within the paintings complicate their position between complicity and power, self-censorship and provocation, and the (sometimes) empowering judgment of the gaze. This dynamic parallels the way a painting exposes the painter, in spite of the painting's subject.
Structural representations or functional illustrations from the field of finance are the base for Ansmann’s work. Through citation, sampling, appropriation and collage, Ansmann exaggerates the functional mode of abstraction inherent to the diagrams, graphs, texts, and visual material he works with, removing most of their contextualizing (often textual) elements. Freed from the former subject and left with nothing but the signifiers and indicators of operation, relation, dependency, and constraint, the imagery develops a new quality of representing the politics and modes of representation native to the artist’s subject matter of finance and economics.
Wald’s paintings from his series woolworth present an ontological anxiety concerning the structural rubric of representation. For Wald, to quote James Krone, painting becomes a substrate from a historical cemetery of media where representation is examined as an architectural construct; architecture not as in bricks and mortar but as the erection of structure. The relation to space stays always present in his painterly explorations of construction elements that erect (digital) architectural structures.