still

(Something lasts / something is motionless / something just goes on / something continues / something is very calm / something is appeased / quiet – as an ode to the moment)
The group exhibition "still" presents works by the artists BARBARA STURM, MONIKA ROMSTEIN and IRIS MUSOLF.
Paintings, collages, a photo work, two video works and a paper work will be presented.

With the large-format paper work "Still life I Loud drawing to annoy the neighbors, 2010" (120 x 85 cm), Barbara Sturm plays with the subtle character that one ascribes a drawing - especially a still life - to. Dense pencil hatching allows the viewer to literally hear the sound of the drawing process. The artist uses the still life in an almost absurd way as an acoustic disturbance, even as a weapon. On the paper, which is only fixed at the top and slightly rolled, there are eraser lint as an expression of a destructive act.
Barbara Sturm's video work “Playing Schönberg to a Rave, 2011” deals with a gathering of people at a wild rave party, which the artist plays over or overlaid acoustically with Schönberg's music from large loudspeakers directly from her studio. The video is partly documentation and partly oversubscription through time manipulation. The monotonous movement of the rave dance becomes a sublime movement through manipulative video technology, in which the film time is adapted to the sound. Here the artist is concerned with a reversal of what is meant subversively. The appropriation of a place by a spontaneous, unannounced rave and its breaking with a piece of music that is classified as serious music, but was quasi scandalous music in its time (Arnold Schönberg, Chamber Symphony No. 1 in E major op. 9 / from 1906).

Monika Romstein selected three small-format oil paintings from 2011 for “still”. Based on personal, associative or foreign templates, the artist develops the subtle visual language that is so typical for her. „Kühl gestimmte Abenddämmerung“ (49,5 x 57 cm) could represent the sunk moment of a landscape contemplation. The view of the forest from the perspective of the one who climbed the mountain. Or does the picture just capture the moment before something unexpected happens? As with „Der düstere Tag / der perfekte Moment“ (45 x 40 cm), where a lady in a theater-like scene is likely to shoot someone right away. As always, Romstein's works are wonderfully charged with tension and defy any sense of sovereignty. Her “Der Gott der Chiffren” (34,5 x 30 cm) is also strange and absurd.
Only at second glance do Monika Romstein's works convey something of the multi-layered painting process on which they are based.

The five paper collages (30 x 40 cm and 40 x 50 cm / from 2008 and 2009) by Iris Musolf are about the physical. Fragile, absurd flesh creatures in search of a body. Iris Musolf uses the mantras of women's magazines that have become images and lets us think about beauty as a construct and the concept of beauty of our time. The artist gets to the heart of the matter in an oppressive way in her latest video work, "Wer schön sein will, muss leiden" (2011), which is also presented here. With the photo work “Duzzy Duck" (2011) the artist follows on from the theme of sex dolls (exhibition: Sex crime, beasts and tenderness, 2011) and stages the object of desire as a tunnel vision into nothingness.
(Text: Gilla Loercher)