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Stephanie Kiwitt
Arthur Zalewski

06/11 – 07/02/2005

Opening: Saturday,  06/11/2006, at 6 p.m.

The Leipzig artist Stephanie Kiwitt differs in her artistic position from the tendencies of contemporary photography that seek to represent versions of a modern city by penetrating the matrix and discharging its model. Kiwitt documents in her delicately tuned method of 'straight photography' the ruptures and manifest excrescences of realized plans as well as these subversively random acts that confront designs of realized monotony. Her Bricolages of daily life, found in European cities, are excrescences of urban structures. These oftentimes oddly appearing interferences seem to inflict as intruder on the city's landscape. However, they adapt perfectly to their surrounding and hence direct the attention to gaps and reparations in the urban texture that otherwise would have slipped the viewer's eye. The common signifier to all images is an anarchistic moment: to counteract the attempt of urban domestication by an individual signature. Stephanie Kiwitt's works convey in all their immediacy of motives almost an aura of calmness that indicates the secret behind this structure without being able - or willing - to solve it.

 

The confrontation with objects that surround us in our daily life constitutes the focus of Arthur Zalewski's sculptural works. Already existing constellations of daily concreteness are the references, which are reflected in his works as representations of common life. Zalewski scrutinizes decidedly objects for their significance in everyday life, their visual and textual characteristics. Yet, this mode of operation does not follow a specific pattern but aims towards a more playful, experimental approach: not the perfectly crafted translation of classical material is in the forefront but the reference to a more abstract level where image and object are mutually dependent. While constantly exchanging their roles one precedes the other and vice versa. Zalewski works in the tense relation of draft and implementation, objectivity and subjectivity. Even in the situation of an exhibition the differentiation between attempt and presentable work becomes increasingly irrelevant and thus emphasizes the respective character of each work.