Deutsche Bank Art at Art Frankfurt
From experimental photography to installation and new painting: each year,
Art Frankfurt provides a comprehensive overview of the current tendencies
in art production. Among the approximately 180 international galleries
represented are names as renowned as the galleries
Henze & Ketterer from Bern,
Lahumiere from Paris, or James Rubin from Milan, who have been closely
involved with the developments in contemporary art for many years. A
special feature of the Frankfurt fair is also, however, an increased
presence of new galleries which are often presenting their promising
programs to a wider public for the first time.
Art Forum Berlin Messestand 2003
Following its
successful presentations at
Art Forum Berlin 2003,
Art Cologne 2003, and the TEFAF in
Maastricht 2004, Deutsche Bank Art will again be taking part in this
year's Art Frankfurt with their own press stand. In keeping with the
fair's open concept, the press stands will be intermingling with the
gallery booths and spread out over the entire exhibition area. Deutsche
Bank Art's 28-square meter stand will once again be appearing with a
design conceived especially for the event. Here, the visitor will have the
opportunity to obtain a new version of the coveted press portfolios
including the last limited poster editions of artists from the Deutsche
Bank Collection
Franz Ackermann,
Marc Brandenburg, and
Miwa Yanagi.
On the Poster Edition
Franz Ackermann: Birthday 2003
Nature is tilting, and civilization follows. In Franz Ackermann's paintings,
an avalanche of cliffs, high-rise architecture, and green lawns collapses
into a seemingly apocalyptic landscape. Not even the sun can be relied on
here, which is burning through the canvas in countless spots of acidic
orange. For the Berlin-based painter, the title piece Birthday that
Ackerman contributed to our poster edition encapsulates that moment "when
one can't decide if the world is in construction or a state of complete
ruin." The visual chaos corresponds to the antagonism between economics
and politics, whose aggressive interplay of forces the viewer is
constantly confronted with in reality. In his painting, Ackermann isn't
searching for memories of places and faraway cartographies. Instead, he
dissolves the narrative logic, "because deception has become an everyday
matter" - no image can comprehend or reconcile the conflicts of
globalization. This is why, to Ackermann's mind, every general survey
ultimately leads to abstraction. Not as a rescue, but an expansion of the
color zone.
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Marc Brandenburg: Ohne Titel (2003)
Organic turns into the inorganic, plastic into skin, bizarre landscapes melt
into glittering trails of graphite: Marc Brandenburg's works always have
something abysmal about them. The Berlin-based artist calls his pencil
drawings "snapshots"; based on semi-documentary photographs and pages
taken from magazines, he has been presenting them in psychedelic
installations since the late nineties, in darkened rooms lit by black
lights. Marked by personal mythologies and the iconography of popular
culture, his image series are reminiscent of film stills composed of
single images distorted in perspective and reversed into negatives.
Miwa Yanagi: Mikiko (2001)
The work
Mikiko from Miwa Yanagi's extensive series My Grandmothers forms
the third part of the press portfolio. Yanagi has already counted among
the most prominent representatives of the young Japanese art scene for
several years, and her photographic works are part of the Deutsche Bank
Collection. For My Grandmothers, Yanagi interviewed young women
about how they imagined their life would be in 50 years' time. The artist
then took the future visions that arose in these dialogues and captured
them in elaborately staged photographs. In nearly supernatural clarity and
brilliance, Yanagi's portraits of women confront traditional Japanese
gender roles with an ambience of technology and progress. Her works are
accompanied by short, poetically suggestive texts taken from the talks she
had with her protagonists and create an additional plane parallel to the
photography itself. Like a voice from off-stage, the text adds a temporal
component to the moment arrested in the photograph, leading the sequence
of images to become a film that unfolds in the mind of the viewer.
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