25.05.19 - 01.09.19
CCA Andratx is excited to present a group show featuring new works by Matthias Bitzer, Sebastian Hammwöhner, Michael Sailstorfer and Gabriel Vormstein. “Stitch in the Aether” is the artists’ first joint show and the displayed works have been created specifically in and for the CCA.
The exhibition marks the temporal encounter of the four German artists during their one-month residency at our Studios. Despite of their different individual practices, the four artists conflate common interests in the research of spatial/temporal perception and memory-based experience. In this sense, the works displayed in “Stitch in the Aether” propose an accurate approach to the sensorial by bringing us into an entwined field of mixed ideas and sensations, an uncertain territory from which to rethink one’s own perceptual abilities.
An on-going exploration of the experiential space across media is Matthias Bitzer’s source of inspiration. By bringing attention to memory exercise, Bitzer’s wallpiece “Superposition of a Gecko” intuitively forces the viewer to acknowledge notions of the unnoticed immediately once inside the entrance hall. Presented as a subtle abstract review of Newton’s gravitational discovery, key elements are to be found throughout the building as well as in the exhibition space. From a formal strategy of discontinuity, his site-specific sculpture, an interrupted wooden snake-like installation, expands as a moving articulation line de- and re-territorializing the inhabited space. Due to its fragmentary nature, the viewer will only achieve the whole vision/contemplation of the work whilst going through it.
In his conceptual and fragmented portrait “Ruhiger Raucher” (“Silent Smoker”), Michael Sailstorfer makes evident his unique understanding of sculptural language. By using everyday objects that have been displaced from their conventionally expected context, here a half-cut tennis ball and a lit cigarette, the work spatially transcends its own physical emplacement in order to actually inhabit its surrounding space with an intangible element - smell. Furthermore, temporality is a pivotal element when confronting Sailstorfer’s work; the use and consumption of the materials highlight its process of becoming, its transformation and transitoriness. The sculpture is hence compelled to acquire entity and meaning through the experience in the beholder’s consciousness.
Where consumption/decay defines Sailstorfer’s notion of temporality, Gabriel Vormsteinmakes repetition his way of composition. “Poetry” and “Be Afraid Whatever is Hate” are part of a new series of works experimenting with potato-print on newspaper. In this process-centred practice, revisiting readymade both as medium and procedure, he promotes the material’s own proprieties used - in creating the work. The repetitive geometrical pattern in Vormstein’s prints become an ordering system, a rhythm bound to be potentially infinite. Taking “Poetry”, for example, the exhaustive repetition of one same word –poema- will lead the beholder towards a semantic satiation in which the word becomes meaningless, while
simultaneously opening a broad framework for the beholder to choose. It becomes clear in this very moment that the work is dependant on each and every instant of the experience.
Repetition is also a central aspect in Sebastian Hammwöhner’s new works; not only as a medium in the creation process, but very specially also with its iconological effects. The appropriation of contemporary digital motifs, such as jpg, Dropbox and iCloud logos, recontextualizes its artistic meaning when the observer verifies this transference from the everyday context into the field of art. Moreover, both its scale and context dislocation appear to open a breach in the reality-continuum, here enhanced by the heaviness of the used materials –sand and salt-. In “Dreaming Awake” the extended repetition of the cloud within the cloud results in a new and unique rendering of the original image.
