Barbara Seiler

When the ballet Le Sacre du Printemps was first performed by Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes at the Theatre du Champs-Élysées in Paris on 29 May 1913 it was greeted with tumult and riot, only stilled by the performance of Marie Piltz as the sacrificial maiden. Subsequent performances were received with growing appreciation, but the ballet’s great difficulties forced it to be presented only six times. The music was written by Igor Stravinsky and the ballet choreographed by Nijinsky not in traditional ballet form, but as what Nijinsky imagined to be a primitive ritual. The music, which lasts about 40 minutes, is divided in two parts: The adoration of Earth and The Sacrifice. Stravinsky had the idea of composing music which was about country people from old times Russia who danced a fertility rite. In this ancient Russian dance, one young girl is chosen to dance and dance until she dies. She is the sacrifice to the god of spring. In 1940, Walt Disney used the music to accompany a segment of the animated movie Fantasia. This segment depicted lumbering dinosaurs and smoldering volcanoes.

This group exhibition combines works of ten contemporary artists who focus on the adoration of Earth and the Sacrifice. The element of the dance as a fertility rite or the dance to enter another stage of consciousness has been practiced since ancient times. It denotes life and death, dream and chaos. At times it is psychedelic and at times dead serious. But always with a renewal that spring brings.

Ulla von Brandenburg (*1974 Karlsruhe, Germany) is a contemporary conceptual artist. Her work is characterized by a diversity of means and media like installations, performances, films, watercolors, murals and collages that answer to one another and which she stages according to different exhibition spaces. Perfectly mastering the codes of scenography, nourished by literature, the history of the arts and architecture but also psychoanalysis, spiritism and magic, she derives as much from esoteric rituals and popular ceremonies, as from the mechanisms and codes of the theatre, to explore the construction of our social structures. Masks, costumes, sets and props coming from different popular traditions thus allow her to transgress symbolically norms and hierarchies by subtly mingling reality and appearances in theatrical presentations. She invites the viewer to become participant by designing stages that question the relationship between illusion and reality, audience and actors.

Michiel Ceulers (*1986 Waregem, Belgium) is concerned with the specific conditions and possibilities of painting, taking an experimental approach to abstraction. His process-oriented abstract paintings and sculptures are known to bear traces of misuse in the artist’s studio. Michiel Ceulers’ practice is associated with excess of materiality. Ceulers has a fascination with cheap and shabby materials, especially cardboard. His works are often composed of found materials and thick layers of paint that are blithely smeared on the paintings and their frames. He often tears, glues, grinds and punctures his canvases, feature imperfect geometric shapes and patterns, a playful exploration of art historical styles. Each painting is a reflection of the result of a process, a physical experience that alienates the works from the artist himself. This conversation is the visualization of an inner process that questions its subject in a constant loop, as a mirror that confronts itself, or as painting that contemplates itself.

Marcel van Eeden (*1965 Den Haag, Netherlands) is considered one of the top ten Dutch contemporary artists. He makes drawings based on images from newspapers and magazines that date before his birth in 1965. In series, that can range to 150 drawings, he combines them to adventure stories about secret agents, art dealers and stunning actresses. By using source imagery and real objects from the past the artist questions our perception about fact and fiction and creates a ‘negative self-portrait’ composed of notes from a past he could not have experienced himself.

Tenki Hiramatsu’s (*1986, Wakayama, Japan) paintings interact with the viewer’s imagination. Eyes that become faces or animals merge into landscapes, which are formed from colored fields and visible brushstrokes. Glowing and unsettled sceneries with creatures showing sharp pointed teeth and eyes ripped open. Forms and colors change constantly during the painting process, transforming into figures and vice versa. Even disappearing from the surface. Painting is a changing process for the artist. A balancing act between abstraction and figuration, between humor and tragedy. In a painting, a lie doesn’t matter much and becomes the truth with the process of viewing. Hiramatsu’s paintings tell stories which are difficult to capture and continue to shift constantly.

Grischa Kaczmarek (*1992 Freiburg, Germany) is a contemporary conceptual artist. Colourful, nostalgic and complex, sonorous and childlike at the same time, the thickly-painted canvases tie together childlike symbols and an adult’s sophistication. Starting from color, form and surface, Kaczmarek finds new sounds and intensity in the art of painting. There is something naive in Grischa Kaczmarek’s works, like a toddler in search of new experiences.

Andres Lutz (*1968 Wettingen, Switzerland) and Anders Guggisberg (*1966 Biel, Switzerland) are active as artists in different artistic fields: Installation, painting, photography, text works, performances or video works. In their expansive installations as well as in their small sculptures, the most diverse intellectual worlds enter into idiosyncratic connections that question traditional concepts of art and open up their own visual artistic cosmos. With their works they create fields of tension that oscillate between genius and dilettantism, between abstraction and figuration, between reality and fiction. Lutz & Guggisberg always succeed in telling stories, or rather in creating stories in such a way that they take shape individually in the minds of the audience.

Daniel Karrer (*1983 Basel, Switzerland) moves predominantly in the broad field of painting. Between reproductions of the digital image world and the painting traditions of past centuries, Karrer’s pictures reflect current pictorial memory. This is shaped by past pictorial ideas as much as by current pictorial aesthetics and wrestles with the contradictions of a medium that offers infinite dimensions or relentless flatness under visual aspects. Since 2016 he has been working with painting behind and on glass.

Caro Niederer (*1963 Zurich, Switzerland) is a contemporary conceptual artist. Her dynamic work engages with themes such as the contextual malleability of images throughout the arts and media, and the creative relationship between art and everyday life. Niederer’s work is multi-media, incorporating various artistic and artisanal techniques such as painting, photography, video, hand-knotted Chinese silk carpets, furniture, porcelain, glasswork, tapestry and multiples. Niederer’s works are based on photographs from her personal photo archive. They are glimpses of everyday situations of the artist and show places where she is and people, often family and friends, who surround her.

Sebastian Stöhrer (*1968, Freiburg, Germany) creates new forms of life out of clay, which have an unusual colorfulness and vocabulary of form. In addition to the clay, he uses various natural materials such as twigs and woods, which he integrates into his sculptures on the one hand as a supporting structure, but above all a collage of materialities emerges. With these foundations and his own personal language of form, which he has developed over a long period of time, he creates ceramic sculptures that seem to come from another world or from the depths of the sea. With openings, curves and branches that transform into legs, the sculptures are vitalized and suddenly recognized as independent organisms. These new forms of life are meant to inhabit the world. The glaze of the sculptures has an extreme luminosity and colorfulness, it seems almost liquid.

Milva Stutz (*1985, Zurich, Switzerland) deals in her work with the ambiguity of gender and body in real and digital space and shows videos, drawings and sculptures. Her work features large-scale drawings of seemingly detached young adults in lush natural settings. Milva Stutz searches for forms of representation of new body and role images and questions the male image of the female body that predominates in art history. But the attribution of biological sex is shaken. Gender characteristics turn out to be symbolizations that, in their ambiguity, take up and undermine socially constructed notions of masculinity and femininity.