Nicole Nickel
Konstrukt
Preview: Saturday, 12th November 2011, 2 – 5 pm
The artist will be present at the preview.
Exhibition: 16th November 2011 – 11th February 2012 (prolonged)
Christmas holiday: 20th December – 7th January 2012
Nicole Nickel (b. 1968, Freudenstadt,
Germany) presents new artworks, which combine fragments of internal and
external space to form three-dimensional objects and collages. Since
graduating in Fine Arts she is intensely concerned with perspective and
spatiality. She teams handmade surfaces of wood, foil and paint with
computer generated structures to form illusions of architecture, whose
ingenious play with perspective and distinct chromaticity fascinates the
viewer. Her colour- and form-compositions are of concrete content: the
man-crafted space. So far her architecture was only implemented in
two-dimensional pictures, now Nicole Nickel took the consequent last
step by creating three-dimensional objects of different layers.
Is there a staircase? Dr. Cosima Lutz
In Nicole Nickels work the world has not come apart at the seams, on the contrary, it is more present than ever. She conforms, apparently absurd, and is transmuted: into something, that is chaos and regularity, digital and analogue, real and imagined. Nickel provides the space with new punchlines: a staircase at the wall? Might I be able to climb the steps if I would be small enough..?
Nickels powerful fragile architectures never remain in 'as-if', they are pure abstractions but attached to real structures. The digital-analogue-scheme starts being permeable, but nobody has to fear getting lost in space. Making something „foreign and yet familiar and attracting“ writes Novalis, „that is romantic poetics“.
Nicole Nickel studied paiting in the class of Prof. Friedemann Hahn. Beside several gallery shows she participate at exhibitions in the Kunsthalle Mannheim and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. She taught from 2007-08 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart. Nicole Nickel lives an works in Berlin.
Is there a staircase? Dr. Cosima Lutz
In Nicole Nickels work the world has not come apart at the seams, on the contrary, it is more present than ever. She conforms, apparently absurd, and is transmuted: into something, that is chaos and regularity, digital and analogue, real and imagined. Nickel provides the space with new punchlines: a staircase at the wall? Might I be able to climb the steps if I would be small enough..?
Nickels powerful fragile architectures never remain in 'as-if', they are pure abstractions but attached to real structures. The digital-analogue-scheme starts being permeable, but nobody has to fear getting lost in space. Making something „foreign and yet familiar and attracting“ writes Novalis, „that is romantic poetics“.
Nicole Nickel studied paiting in the class of Prof. Friedemann Hahn. Beside several gallery shows she participate at exhibitions in the Kunsthalle Mannheim and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. She taught from 2007-08 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart. Nicole Nickel lives an works in Berlin.
Aram Bartholl + JODI
Ready for Upgrade
Preview: 9th September, 6 – 10 pm
The artists will attend the preview.
Exhibition: 10th September – 29th October 2011
Special opening hours DC-OPEN:
Saturday, 10th September, 12 – 8 pm
Sunday, 11th September, 12 – 6 pm
[DAM]Cologne presents Ready for Upgrade, the first
joint group exhibition of three artists, who are dealing
with internet culture and the appearance of the internet.
The artist couple JODI belongs to the most important net
artists. Since the early days of the internet they have
irritated and fascinated the viewer with their disturbing
and suprising works and performances. Their oeuvre belongs
to the avant-garde of the computer age representing a
milestone in contemporary art. Aram Bartholl summarizes
his work with his statement: “net data world versus
everyday living space”. The tension between public and
private, online and offline, technology infatuation and
everyday life creates the core of his production. In
predominantly public interventions and installations
Bartholl examines which and how parts of the digital world
can reach back into reality.
Beside his successful and much talked about project DeadDrops (2010), which will be simultaneously shown at the MoMA exhibition Talk to Me, Aram Bartholl (*1972, Bremen) will present Are you human?. The work consists of CAPTCHA codes made of aluminium. These codes form an integral part of online bookings and inquiries. CAPTCHA can be understood as an attempt of a machine to detect if their counterpart is human. Web based services decide by means of a correct or incorrect typing of a random character-digit-sequence whether they encounter a human being or an automated script, without grasping the sense of the signs developed for communication.
The videogame Counterstrike is played by millions of people worldwide. The idea of the project Dust is to reconstruct a real-life replication of the game setting, that only consist of a small number of rooms, as a place of our collective memory which no one has entered so far. Dust is a long-term project. A 3D-Model and c-prints of the drawings give a first impression of the setting.
Beside numerous workshops and performances Bartholl exhibited at the Portsmouth Museum of Art, USA, KUMU Art Museum, Tallin, NIMK Netherlands Media Arts Institute, Amsterdam, Eyebeam, New York, Kunsthal Amersfoort, Netherlands, FACT, Liverpool and at Kunstverein Hamburg. Aram Bartholl lives and works in Berlin.
„Fighting back computer“ - Nam June Paik's motto „Fighting back television“ transferred into nowadays – that could be a basic description of JODI's work, a strong reflection on the most powerful media of our generation. Alex Galloway is pointing out in his brilliant essay “WrongBrowser” the aggression and the destruction, that are the basis of many of JODI's pieces – the decomposition of the accustomed user-friendly graphic surface, the evocation of automatised processes in the computer – but also the birth of something new and unexpected out of these destruction processes. JODI is breaking up the structure of the internet, they penetrate the core of the computer and treat the internet even physically in their performances, as they did in Folded Screen Series by scrunching up a flexible screen built with LEDs and connected to the internet or by wrapping a body into it. Galloway is writing about Wrong Browsers: “In the early web there was, for all practical purposes, only a small number of these extensions, including “.com”, “.net”, and “.org”. But in parallel with these extensions, inarguably tainted as “American” by default, there began to grow in importance the various extensions assigned to specific nation-states. Hence “.br” for Brazil, “.fr” for France, and so on. But rather than signaling a newfound opportunity for nationally-specific web presences, the collision of the offline world with the online world sowed a profound disappointment in Jodi, as if these special national contexts had become standardized and limp, simply by virtue of being raised to the same semantic level as all of the dot-com domains. If “.com” and “.de” are essentially equivalent then what's the point of specifying one over the other? This is part of what drove Jodi to embark on Wrong Browser. They wanted to register their disappointment with the newfound standardization wrought by the national domain extensions.”
JODI has i.a. exhibited at Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Guggenheim Museum, New York, SFMOMA, San Francisco, Centre Pompidou, Paris, Nam June Paik Center, Korea, Hartware Medien Kunst Verein, Dortmund, NTT/ICC, Tokyo, ZKM, Karlsruhe, Witte de With, Rotterdam, as well as at documenta X, Kassel. They live and work in Dordrecht, Netherlands.
Beside his successful and much talked about project DeadDrops (2010), which will be simultaneously shown at the MoMA exhibition Talk to Me, Aram Bartholl (*1972, Bremen) will present Are you human?. The work consists of CAPTCHA codes made of aluminium. These codes form an integral part of online bookings and inquiries. CAPTCHA can be understood as an attempt of a machine to detect if their counterpart is human. Web based services decide by means of a correct or incorrect typing of a random character-digit-sequence whether they encounter a human being or an automated script, without grasping the sense of the signs developed for communication.
The videogame Counterstrike is played by millions of people worldwide. The idea of the project Dust is to reconstruct a real-life replication of the game setting, that only consist of a small number of rooms, as a place of our collective memory which no one has entered so far. Dust is a long-term project. A 3D-Model and c-prints of the drawings give a first impression of the setting.
Beside numerous workshops and performances Bartholl exhibited at the Portsmouth Museum of Art, USA, KUMU Art Museum, Tallin, NIMK Netherlands Media Arts Institute, Amsterdam, Eyebeam, New York, Kunsthal Amersfoort, Netherlands, FACT, Liverpool and at Kunstverein Hamburg. Aram Bartholl lives and works in Berlin.
„Fighting back computer“ - Nam June Paik's motto „Fighting back television“ transferred into nowadays – that could be a basic description of JODI's work, a strong reflection on the most powerful media of our generation. Alex Galloway is pointing out in his brilliant essay “WrongBrowser” the aggression and the destruction, that are the basis of many of JODI's pieces – the decomposition of the accustomed user-friendly graphic surface, the evocation of automatised processes in the computer – but also the birth of something new and unexpected out of these destruction processes. JODI is breaking up the structure of the internet, they penetrate the core of the computer and treat the internet even physically in their performances, as they did in Folded Screen Series by scrunching up a flexible screen built with LEDs and connected to the internet or by wrapping a body into it. Galloway is writing about Wrong Browsers: “In the early web there was, for all practical purposes, only a small number of these extensions, including “.com”, “.net”, and “.org”. But in parallel with these extensions, inarguably tainted as “American” by default, there began to grow in importance the various extensions assigned to specific nation-states. Hence “.br” for Brazil, “.fr” for France, and so on. But rather than signaling a newfound opportunity for nationally-specific web presences, the collision of the offline world with the online world sowed a profound disappointment in Jodi, as if these special national contexts had become standardized and limp, simply by virtue of being raised to the same semantic level as all of the dot-com domains. If “.com” and “.de” are essentially equivalent then what's the point of specifying one over the other? This is part of what drove Jodi to embark on Wrong Browser. They wanted to register their disappointment with the newfound standardization wrought by the national domain extensions.”
JODI has i.a. exhibited at Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Guggenheim Museum, New York, SFMOMA, San Francisco, Centre Pompidou, Paris, Nam June Paik Center, Korea, Hartware Medien Kunst Verein, Dortmund, NTT/ICC, Tokyo, ZKM, Karlsruhe, Witte de With, Rotterdam, as well as at documenta X, Kassel. They live and work in Dordrecht, Netherlands.
Christa Sommerer & Laurent Mignonneau
The Value of Art
Preview: Sat, 7th May, 2 - 5 pm
The artists will be present at the preview.
Exhibition: 11th May -16th July 2011
The Value of Art is
the first piece from a series of artworks in which Christa Sommerer and
Laurent Mignonneau deal with the accumulation of value taking place in
museums as well as on the art market and it is an outstanding
realisation of the market's laws. The artists purchased the painting
'Unruhige See' (Rough Sea) by an unknown artist called R. Hansen,
equiped it with sensors which record how many and how long visitors stay
in front of the artwork. With every reckoning the value of the painting
rises and will be printed on a small piece of paper. Hence after every
exhibition the value of the picture rose according to the attention it
received.
Christa Sommerer's und Laurent Mignonneau's interactive works were able to go down in history due to their complexity and unusual, innovative interfaces. They have been presented in numerous international exhibitions e.g. at the Museum Tinguely, Basel; ARos Aarhus Kunstmuseum; Kunsthaus Graz; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Kunsthalle Vienna; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; MOT Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Museo Bellas Artes, Santiago de Chile; Seoul Metropolitan Museum of Art; NTT-ICC Museum Tokyo; Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern; ITAU Culutural Foundation, Sao Paolo; Wallraf-Richartz-Museum Cologne.
At the moment Christa Sommerer und Laurent Mignonneau are living and working in Linz where they run the InterfaceCulture Lab at the University for Art and Design. Before they were both working in Japan for several years as professors and artists.
Christa Sommerer's und Laurent Mignonneau's interactive works were able to go down in history due to their complexity and unusual, innovative interfaces. They have been presented in numerous international exhibitions e.g. at the Museum Tinguely, Basel; ARos Aarhus Kunstmuseum; Kunsthaus Graz; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Kunsthalle Vienna; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; MOT Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Museo Bellas Artes, Santiago de Chile; Seoul Metropolitan Museum of Art; NTT-ICC Museum Tokyo; Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern; ITAU Culutural Foundation, Sao Paolo; Wallraf-Richartz-Museum Cologne.
At the moment Christa Sommerer und Laurent Mignonneau are living and working in Linz where they run the InterfaceCulture Lab at the University for Art and Design. Before they were both working in Japan for several years as professors and artists.
Manfred Mohr
parallelResonance
Preview: Sat, 19th March, 3 - 5 pm
The artist will be present at the preview.
Exhibition: 23rd March - 21st April 2011
The exhibition will be shown at [DAM]Berlin afterwards in the course of the Gallery Weekend.Exhibition: 23rd March - 21st April 2011
ParallelResonance is the latest series of Manfred Mohr and the software pieces are exhibited for the first time internationally at Gallery [DAM]Cologne. parallelResonance is the 4th cycle of artwork, which Manfred Mohr produced as a software artwork, beside a series of pictures. In the series Mohr is exploring in his characteristically straight forward forms and colours the tension fields between the shifting black and white lines and plaines. The changing colours of the background range in pastel-coloured shades. Beside the software pieces the exhibition also features large-scale and small prints from the series.
Manfred Mohr's artworks are based on custom-authored algorithms. Mohr belongs internationally to the most successful artists in the field of software art. Since 1973 he is exploring the logical and mathematical structure of cubes or hypercubes as well as their lines, planes and their relationships. Mohr co-founded the "Art et Informatique" seminar in 1969 at Vincenne University in Paris, and his first major solo museum exhibition 'Une esthétique programmée' took place in 1971 at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. That exhibition has become known historically as the first solo show in a museum of works entirely calculated and drawn by a computer.
'The main elements of the algorithm are two randomly selected and superimposed 11-dimensional diagonal-paths (see: emohr.com, workphases "Dimensions" 1978, "Laserglyphs" 1991 and "Klangfarben" 2007). Both diagonal-paths have a very thick line width (line expansion) with their edges running parallel on both sides of the original diagonal-path. The top line expansion is always WHITE describing a white form. The bottom line expansion is BLACK and describes a black form. Both forms are projected on a colored background. In calculated intervals, the black form interchanges with the colored background so that the background becomes black and the previously black form assumes a color. These exchanges create continuously new visual relations in form and tension fields. The clearly visible thin black/white lines in the image show the original diagonal-paths.'
Manfred Mohr, 2011
Some of the collections in which he is represented: Centre Pompidou, Paris; Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Chicago; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Ludwig Museum, Cologne; Wilhelm-Hack-Museum, Ludwigshafen; Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Stuttgart; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Museum im Kulturspeicher, Würzburg; Kunsthalle Bremen, Bremen; Musée d'Art Moderne et Contemporain, Strasbourg; Daimler Contemporary, Berlin; Musée d'Art Contemporain, Montreal; McCrory Collection, New York; Esther Grether Collection, Basel.
He took part in numerous solo and group shows i.e. at the MoMA - Museum of Modern Art, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; ZKM (Center for Art and Media), Karlsruhe; Museum Ritter, Waldenbuch; Museo Nacional Centro de Reina Sofia, Madrid; MoCA, Los Angeles; National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; MoMA-PS1, New York; ARC - Musée d'Art Moderne de la ville de Paris, Paris; Museum for Concrete Art, Ingolstadt; Vasarely Museum, Budapest.
Among the awards he received are: Golden Nica from Ars Electronica, Linz; Camille Graesser-Preis, Zürich; [ddaa] d.velop Digital Art Award, Berlin; Artist Fellowship, New York Foundation of the Arts.
boredomresearch
Brilliant Cloud
Opening: Saturday, 22th January, 3 - 5 pm
Exhibition: 26th January - 12th March 2011
Brilliant Cloud continues boredomresearchs' exploration of
landscape. The abstractions of computation and influence of Eastern Art
forms combine, to give the work a unique poetic presence. This reflects
and plays withExhibition: 26th January - 12th March 2011
ambiguities which both distinguish and unify many natural forms.
Specifically, Brilliant Cloud explores the contradiction of solid geological structures within a vapourific cloudlike formation. Hundreds of coloured bands interact with a vibrant intensity and presence like cross-sections from giant agate. From a distance the work appears as a collection of islands viewed from above while at the same time floating weightlessly in a composition deeply reminiscent of Japanese stylised clouds. A closer inspection reveals the complex mass of concentric circles - fluid, active, dynamic. Like the countless water droplets that combine to make clouds these appear to have been caught in motion, now fixed solid. The imagination is constantly dislodged from either one or other of these opposing fictions freeing itself to explore the poetic space in-between.
Collaborating as boredomresearch, Southampton-based Vicky Isley and Paul Smith make artworks inspired by the diversity that exists in nature. Their practice uses computer modelling techniques to explore the creative potential of diversity. Inspired by pattern formations such as the marks on butterfly wings, boredomresearch create new, intricate and diverse forms of intrigue and beauty. In many of their artworks they have employed artificial life techniques to bring these forms to life creating works that unfold in real time.
Eelco Brand
Field of View
Videos: P.Movi Y.Movi
Preview: Sat., 13th November 2010, 3-5 pm
Exhibition: 17th November 2010 - 15th January 2011
Field of View is the first solo exhibition of Eelco Brand in Cologne. It features three new films - shown for the first time - along with 3D constructed colour prints and handmade pencil drawings.
An abstract molecularly looking object is floating above a hyperreal marsh landscape, a glossy blue amorphous form is lying on a meadow. The oeuvre of Eelco Brand belongs to a pictorial tradition in which landscape and genre scenes play a leading role, but goes beyond the traditional forms of this genre. Realistically looking landscapes are combined with abstract components, absurdity and humour are constantly accompanying the artworks of Eelco Brand. The landscapes seem familiar to us, evoking the impression of having seen them before - stereotypes, completely virtually constructed, but of a strong expressive power. But is not any form of visualisation of landscapes constructed, even those we see in our mind's eye when we imagine a landscape? The artworks of Eelco Brand encourages us to think about our perception of reality. Also the pencil drawings of the artist are irritating since he uses a language of forms that the viewer is immediately associating with basic 3D computer constructions. In Brand's films the viewer is effortlessly changing perspectives: crawling like bugs, moving below and above a water surface. Mushrooms turn into floating jellyfish-like forms. The slow movements as well as the endlessly repeating loop of the short films are nearly meditativeand do not meet in any respect with the expectation that we have of animated films.
The Dutch artist Eelco Brand (b. 1969) studied painting but turned to working exclusively to constructing film and images with 3D. "Painting largely consists of adding and removing elements. You work on an image that evolves through its own logic. For me, constructing a 3-D image is the same as painting. But the fascinating thing about working with 3-D constructions is that you can enter the virtual space behind the two-dimensional surface and, more importantly, you also have the possibility of animating a scene. This means that suddenly you can go beyond the static medium of painting, and can add both movement and sound. This has created completely new ways of constructing and presenting works. The scenes I construct as prints or animations are virtual and hand-made. I don't use photographic materials or scanned images." (Eelco Brand in an interview with Wolf Lieser in Eyemazing, 2007)
Eelco Brand lives and works in Breda, The Netherlands. His work has been shown internationally in Seoul, Moscow as well as in New York and are part of public and private collections all over Europe. Field of View is the second solo show of the artist at Gallery [DAM] Berlin/Cologne.