Put-to-bed
Put-to-bed
Tashi Brauen & Chris Bünter, Michael Günzburger, Clare Kenny, Kong Chun Hei, Valentina Pini and Sabine Schlatter
Opening: 05.11.2021 from 18:00
05.11. – 18.12.2021
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"And the way I try to bring appearance about makes one question all the time what appearance is at all. The longer you work, the more the mystery deepens of what appearance is, or how can what is called appearance be made in another medium. And it needs a sort of moment of magic to coagulate color and form so that it gets the equivalent of appearance, the appearance that you see at any moment, because so-called appearance is only riveted for one moment as that appearance. In a second you may blink your eyes or turn your head slightly, and you look again and the appearance has changed. I mean, appearance is like a continuously floating thing."
– Francis Bacon, Interview with David Sylvester, September 1974
Put-to-bed features contemporary artists who explore ideas of transfer or use process-like and time-based methods in their artistic practice. They address trace-making and explore the tactility and material transformations of many media such as printmaking, painting, collage, drawing or sculpture. Many of the artistic decisions and outcomes are related to the speculative, intuitive and chanceful. That which is absolute or affirmative in clarity is not necessarily sought out. Instead their practices reflects an inclination towards thinking about how meaning flows, mutates, and re-forms, as well as the uncertainty of perception and the illusory quality of art. What results is a fascinating testing ground of the outcome of material and artworks that elude easy definition.
The exhibition features widely assorted motifs: the body, the organic, movement and the everyday, to name just a few. Some of the artworks present surface appearances of nature, whilst others refer to technologies of reproduction. Various overlaps connect the different practices be it materially, in their ways of compositionally thinking about negative and positive space or in their style of hovering between abstraction and figuration.
The title of the exhibition Put-to-bed is an idiom that means “to complete something and either set it aside or send it on to the next step… This expression, transferring night time retirement to other kinds of completion, was first applied to a newspaper, where it meant "send to press," that is, start to print." (The Free Dictionary)