Anna Sophie Berger, Benjamin Hirte at CICCIO
Artists: Anna Sophie Berger, Benjamin Hirte
Venue: CICCIO, Brooklyn
Exhibition Title: The Jurist
Date: January 25 – February 23, 2020
Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.
Images:
Images courtesy of CICCIO, Brooklyn
Press Release:
In a montage some things gain meaning while others seem even more lost in the line up. Why is that?
The
painting features a male figure in half-profile, gazing to the left.
The face is composed of fish and plucked poultry. The figure wears a
black cap. The fur lined coat is half open. The torso underneath
the coat is formed of books and manuscripts. The chest consists of a
black folder from which white pages protrude, forming a collar. The
lower chest is delineated by two books featuring the
inscription INSERNIA and BARTHO respectively. The tail of a trout makes
the chin and the mouth is that of a fish. One cheek is a chicken thigh.
The nose is made of the rump of an entire plucked chicken, whose
wings also form the eye brows while the eye of the chicken doubles as
the eye of the man. The chicken’s black legs make up the moustache. The
cheek is constructed using the leg of a larger poultry whose wing forms
the man’s temple.1
At McCarren Pool in Brooklyn,
there is a sign mounted to the brick wall outside the locker rooms. The
sign’s background is the classical dark green seen in all New York city
parks and recreational areas. It features the white line drawing of the
head of a figure with short stubby hair holding its nose. To the right
of the drawing is the white logo of New York City department of health.
On top of the drawing in red letters the sign reads “NO BREATH-HOLDING
CONTESTS” in large capitalized letters. Underneath the drawing inside a
white rectangle the following sentence is written: “Taking deep breaths,
one after the other, before swimming underwater can be deadly!” And yet
another segment of text, in even smaller type, is printed below the
white rectangle, stating: “Prolonged or repetitive breath-holding can be
deadly. No intentional hyperventilation or underwater competitive
breath-holding.” NYC Health Code, §165.41
The central shape of the Tragedy Tub
is derived from the mouth of an ancient Greek tragedy mask. Its
sculptural form as a pool like object translates the outcry into three
dimensional space, creating depth in the most basic way and thereby
becoming a container. The upper surface of the object is made of bitumen
roofing patches and a coat of aluminum reflective roof coating lacquer
typical for New York’s tenement roof landscape. The silver appearance of
the lacquer comes from aluminum flakes mixed into a tar-based solvent,
making it reflective, and helping to cool the surface of the roof.
In the novel 2666
by Roberto Bolaño, the literary figure of a German writer and poet
named after the Renaissance painter Arcimboldo disappears somewhere in
the desert of northern Mexico.
Arcimboldo’s paintings have an encyclopedic and almost idiotically simple approach, which time makes divine.
1 Translated from German Wikipedia entry for The Jurist by Giuseppe Arcimboldo, 1566
