© Images Henning Bohl
HENNING BOHL
THE ATE RT ODAY
KÖNIG BERLIN
14 OCTOBER – 15 NOVEMBER 2008
With a first solo exhibition, we are pleased to introduce the artist Henning Bohl to our gallery program. Bohl will be showing a series of works of large format mounted as an installation within the gallery space. Attached to the cornice above the walls, the canvases seem like free-hanging curtains or tapestries, which intermittently reveal the letters THE ATE R HE UTE in between. Parallel across the space, a displaced imitation of the cornice reads the corresponding fragments of the letters PSYCH OLOG Y T ODAY.
The large images, irradiating opulence despite their emphasized simplicity, show cut-out paper drops or tears, as well as circular and sickle forms, which originally borrowed from mask-like Kabuki faces covered in make-up are pasted as abstract elements onto the white-primed canvases. Large surfaces of colored paper cover these form arrays, sticking out from the edges like stubborn packing paper or rolling up at the edges, thus creating a second image plane. As if looking through a curtain, another space is opened in which the “image within the image” can be seen. The image becomes a stage. Despite the strict canons of form and the constriction to found material (like the limited color palette of construction paper), the works give way to a great variety of associations and histories. Furthermore, the gallery as an exhibition space serves in this context “as a multilayered storytelling device” (Manfred Hermes). Michaela Eichwald describes Bohl's way of working as “ein mehrschichtiges Sampler- und Composertum” (“a multilayered way of sampling and composing”). In a kind of “Workshop-weaving mill, Bohl weaves, entangles and bolts together intrinsic and extrinsic into new.” For the artist, basically, everything is potential material, including his own work. Hence, motifs from earlier works might appear recycled in the new ones. By utilizing already used fragments and the negative residues of cut-out paper forms, Bohl develops an economics of image production, activating a logic of its own in its process.
14 OCTOBER – 15 NOVEMBER 2008
With a first solo exhibition, we are pleased to introduce the artist Henning Bohl to our gallery program. Bohl will be showing a series of works of large format mounted as an installation within the gallery space. Attached to the cornice above the walls, the canvases seem like free-hanging curtains or tapestries, which intermittently reveal the letters THE ATE R HE UTE in between. Parallel across the space, a displaced imitation of the cornice reads the corresponding fragments of the letters PSYCH OLOG Y T ODAY.
The large images, irradiating opulence despite their emphasized simplicity, show cut-out paper drops or tears, as well as circular and sickle forms, which originally borrowed from mask-like Kabuki faces covered in make-up are pasted as abstract elements onto the white-primed canvases. Large surfaces of colored paper cover these form arrays, sticking out from the edges like stubborn packing paper or rolling up at the edges, thus creating a second image plane. As if looking through a curtain, another space is opened in which the “image within the image” can be seen. The image becomes a stage. Despite the strict canons of form and the constriction to found material (like the limited color palette of construction paper), the works give way to a great variety of associations and histories. Furthermore, the gallery as an exhibition space serves in this context “as a multilayered storytelling device” (Manfred Hermes). Michaela Eichwald describes Bohl's way of working as “ein mehrschichtiges Sampler- und Composertum” (“a multilayered way of sampling and composing”). In a kind of “Workshop-weaving mill, Bohl weaves, entangles and bolts together intrinsic and extrinsic into new.” For the artist, basically, everything is potential material, including his own work. Hence, motifs from earlier works might appear recycled in the new ones. By utilizing already used fragments and the negative residues of cut-out paper forms, Bohl develops an economics of image production, activating a logic of its own in its process.