PREPARING FOR DARKNESS @ Kühlhaus Berlin

This exhibit is colored by motivic fractures and melancholic introspection. A postromantic utopia that unites inner and outer realities expresses itself in palpable tension and a revelry of presence and absence. Just as an artist retreats into her studio for safety, these subjects long to withdraw from their environment. They are reluctant and often alone; mysterious and seeking. They seem fragile and avoidant, but at the same time completely confident in their own intuition. Subjects are veiled, abstracted, or merged into blurred surfaces, narrating a subtly perceptible severance from a seemingly obvious reality. The union between inner and outer worlds emerges on purely pictorial and conceptual levels, and remains a driving force that is consistently transferred into the unconscious. Retreat allows for the embodiment of a multilayered “I” precisely because of the existence of an outer world that insists on containing these intentions. So, who’s there? I’m not.

text by Uwe Goldenstein