When: 26 July 2019, 7 pm – 10 pm
Where: Exgirlfriend Gallery Lankwitzer Str. 14, 12107 Berlin
Artists: Margarethe Kollmer (Germany), Michalina Bigaj (Poland)and Magdalena Lazar (Poland)
We cordially invite you to the opening of Exgirlfriend’s first showing of new work since upgrading to its 150 m2 gallery space.
Exgirlfriend is inaugurating its first season at its new location with two complementary exhibitions, “Space Idiot” by Margarethe Kollmer, and “Most of all, don’t go into the forest,” a collaborative effort by Krakow-based artists Michalina Bigaj and Magdalena Lazar.
The inspirations for Margarethe Kollmer’s wry explorations of the intersection of the human body and technology range from online photos of people laughing to the phenomenon of the “dick pic.” Be it a film, oil painting, or digital print, Kollmer’s work typically obscures its references but without obliterating the awareness of a human subject. She plays with visual and artistic clichés, sometimes blurring images to the point of abstraction, in search of the nineteenth-century ideal of “fulfilled absence.”
For Michalina Bigaj and Magdalena Lazar, the point of contact between technology and the human subject is a power play: In “Most of all, don’t go into the forest,” they consider how our utopian obsession with invention and progress stems from a desire to control natural processes. In Lazar’s 2-channel “Glass Perspective,” a fairy tale about an eternal white rose becomes the basis for contemplating the human antipathy to decay and the desire to have constant access to the fruits of nature. Bigaj’s “Apparent Polar Night” installation is inspired by the small Italian town of Viganella: Destined by its landscape to sit in a shadow for 83 days a year, the town constructed a giant mirror to force sunlight to “bend” to its will.
Exgirlfriend was founded by the multi-national curator Elena Feijoo in 2016 as an exhibition space for contemporary art bounded by no rules but oriented towards conceptual work dealing with digital technologies, posthumanism, and the representation of historically underrepresented groups. In 2019, Ms. Feijoo founded Human Esthetic Resources (HER) in order to create a 1000 m2 community that hosts artist studios and co-working spaces, a photo studio, and a larger and more flexible home for Exgirlfriend. Please join us July 26th for the first dual exhibitions of the 2019/2020 season.
http://www.margarethekollmer.com/