Cutting Spaces

From Printmaking to Paper Cutting

08/02—12/04/26

 

Benjamin Badock, Gabriele Basch, Jan Brokof, Kurt Buchwald, Jana Gunstheimer, Jakob Hinrichs, Günther Hornig, Frank Lippold, Inken Reinert, Nadja Schöllhammer, Michaela Schweiger, Anja Warzecha, Eva-Maria Wilde

 

Architectures, identities, and perceptions converge in the city at their most concentrated. They stand side by side, touch, overlap, and rebound. Artists approach this intersecting space from diverse perspectives, pushing boundaries and opening up new viewpoints not only on their subject matter but also on their respective artistic mediums. The exhibition unfolds from the inside out and back again. Dwelling becomes intertwined with identity and memory. Monotony and variation alternate in close-up and bird’s-eye views of the city. Strolling through the streets from Zwickau to Paris, the exhibition explores states of mind oscillating between boredom and anxiety, norm and transgression. A shift in perspective is inevitable.

 

Wall units made of GDR-era particleboard are removed from living rooms and reimagined as temporary installations in the exhibition space. The biographies of women from the GDR form the starting point of an acoustic-visual staging that connects them with fashion designs from the magazine Sibylle. Between inside and outside, endless facades are juxtaposed in intricate drawings, where deviation is visible only as a nuance. In contrast, painted views of Frankfurt (Oder), like dice, promise a city of desires. High-rise sculptures evoke the Tower of Babel as well as fantastical architectural designs. Maps, rendered as paper cutouts, offer a view from the very top, where the invisible, the missing element, is given equal weight to the visible. Found objects from the street, arranged in stage-like montages, provoke feelings ranging from the uncanny to the delirious. Wall hangings and room dividers connect Erzgebirge craftsmanship with new (East) German realities. Woodcuts, which superimpose different perspectives, rethink the printing block. In the photographic exploration of reality, cityscapes become a semi-concealed subject and experimental setup; dilapidated old buildings, as superimposed locations, form an enigmatic backdrop to a fragmented era. A teenager’s room in a prefabricated apartment building, rendered as a life-size woodcut, is actually a walk-in space. The prefabricated building itself is transformed into an affordable print product through a computer modulator, developing a color palette that doesn’t correspond to a lived reality. „Be Good“ proclaims the disciplining aspect of the city, which is rooted not only in the uniformity of prefabricated construction but also in the tight social fabric. Brightly colored figures dance through the space as if in a dream sequence, their multi-perspective approach breaks with all rules and certainties.