Subversive figures
Matthias Harder
Cooperative galleries are experiencing a boom right now in Berlin, just as they did in the late 1970s. Today these collectives exist usually for no more than one or two years before they are incorporated into the programs of their larger counterparts. This is what happened recently with Liga, a testing ground for young Leipzig artists, some of whom now work with the Berlin gallerist Judy Lybke and have since found their way into various Florida collections. Two new Berlin galleries that might have the same fate are Amerika and Echolot.
Cornelia Renz has an exhibition of recent drawings and collages–in cooperation with Marcel Bühler–in the three rooms of Echolot. It’s part of her burgeoning popularity: alongside the Echolot show, Renz is also at Berlinische Galerie, having recently won the Schering Foundation Art Prize. Meanwhile, Renz has already arrived in the U.S. with an exhibition at Goff + Rosenthal in New York this spring.
The Echelot exhibition title, "Paradise" bears religious and art historical connotations that are counteracted by the cheeky figures populating the works and the ambiguous situations depicted. Renz studied in Leipzig at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst, and since then she has been pursuing variations on a theme: young people in strange poses and absurd yet everyday scenes with a sense of awakening sexuality combined with art historical quotes and motifs borrowed from the media. These are mostly independent, aggressive girls very aware of their nudity–women-children á la Lolita–in an oddly cool and uninhabitable pictorial space. The work seems to refer to the brutal transsexual drawings of Henry Darger. As harmless as these children and adolescents may appear at first glance, on closer inspection they seem precocious and jaded. They originate from scientific journals on deformations and from American underground comics similarly occupied with the theme of puberty. There is a short story in each of Renz’s pictures, a comic strip fairytale condensed into a single image, but without a happy ending.
The works are formally unusual: the outline of figures, blossoms, and other objects, flattens and compartmentalizes to the point of creating ornamental patterns. In some cases hatched lines are painted onto the Plexiglas of the hand-finished picture frames, creating a subtle three-dimensional effect. These flickering lines, accurately drawn, mechanically created with a ruler, or simply the result of a freehanded gesture, are related to Renz’s earlier work with etching.
Neo Rauch, who studied at the art academy shortly before Renz, once described the medium of painting as "a continuation of a dream but through other means"–thereby making a conscious reference to Surrealism. For Renz, this neo-surrealism is the background for her magical, timelessly contemporary visual vocabulary. She carefully balances the real and the fantastic, the emotional and the technical. A certain ambiguity remains in these figurative drawings, which verge on the three-dimensional. It remains unclear whether the protagonists–and the artist–have fled to a parallel fantasy world or whether this vividly narrative view of the world resembles a slick vision of future technoid kids.
