Paul Kopeikin Gallery Announces
A Group Exhibit "Wunderlust Berlin"
The Paul Kopeikin Gallery is proud to present Wunderlust Berlin, a group exhibition of non-native artists who are currently living and working in Berlin, curated by Laurie De Chiara. This exhibition opens Saturday, January 12, 2008 and runs through February 8, 2008. A reception will take place on Saturday, January 12, 2008 from 6:00 to 8:00 PM. The reception is free and open to the public. The gallery is located at 6150 Wilshire Boulevard, just west of Fairfax. For information call (323) 937-0765 or visit our website at paulkopeikingallery.com
In principle, any abstraction of the object is allowed which has a sufficiently strong creative power behind it. -Max Beckmann
Wunderlust Berlin is a group exhibition of artists who, though not natives, are currently living and working in Berlin. The exhibiting artists come from different backgrounds, cultures and represent varied artistic approaches. Beyond their shared commonality of where the work was produced, the exhibit presents a range of styles, references, thought processes and outcomes. In the "Zeitgeist Metropolis" as some people refer to Berlin, an ever-changing and trendsetting haven is open for one to explore, discover, retreat, produce, challenge, and reinvent. It is a constant state of flux not necessarily in search of an end but of another perspective. Wunderlust, translates to mean "magical desire", which calls for much interpretation through the eyes of the creator and the viewer. Thus the idea of the exhibition is to allow for all possibilities of what one actually sees or wants to see.
The artworks presented in Wunderlust Berlin encourage interpretation by not providing answers but perhaps more questions. There are layers of mystery some more abstract then others but all provoking discourse. Warren Neidich's large-scale photograph is of a staged meeting of two people at Café Bravo who sit together with their faces covered. David Hatcher's eye chart work initially reads as just letters but when one focuses there is a clear message coming through. Wolfgang May presents documentation of a "tree house of dreams" where he shows his plans of travel for the tree house to locations all over the world each time giving it a new life. In the video of "Neuhaus" the artist duo Franz Hoefner and Harry Sachs's reconstruct a vacant "Plattenbauten" (a typical East Bloc German apartment complex) in a condensed version and invite visitors to crawl through the space and explore on their own.
Cornelia Schmidt-Bleek's drawings of elaborate Victorian birdcages juxtaposed with Fibonacci number configurations make a commentary on the opulently designed environments for birds and rapid growth of the times. In Peter Freitag's, photo-collage series "Private Stages" posing nudes have been altered which redirects the viewers' attention to the background, creating a mystery of what was once there. David Krippendorff's obscured photograph, "Darkness Shades Me", gives a sublime presence to this almost absent bouquet of flowers. Stefan Saffer's cut and folded poster compositions are improvisations, constructed to transform the popular printed image and carving out a new space for the viewer. Architectural structures are abstracted in Eva-Maria Wilde's collages of layered fields of color and tape to construct a completely new formation.
Matthew Burbridge's ironic works are commentaries on recent art forms such as "pseudo- formalism" which opens up a platform for contemporary art practice discourse. Elena Bajo is a "social sculptor" taking her starting point from existing objects or paintings, deconstructing them and then recontextualizing their form in an installation dealing with the subtle relationships.
PAUL KOPEIKIN
owner
email: paul@paulkopeikingallery.com
phone: 323.937.0765
