Exhibition hall 1a

Britta Lumer, Margit Seiler

Britta Lumer paints huge, larger-than-life heads with a surprising multi-perspective transparency. In many layers of washed-out ink on paper, she demonstrates an outstanding mastery of her craft. Margit Seiler forms abstract body fragments from soft stone with her extremely sub-life-size sculptures, which in themselves represent a calm, meditative whole.
On an interpretative level, this exhibition deals with questions of the fragmented multiplicity of human identity and thus also with our self-image as human subjects in a disrupted time.

about Britta Lumer: "Lange Sicht", Daniel Marzona, for the exhibition of the same name, Galerie Daniel Marzona, Berlin 2018:

Over the past few decades, Britta Lumer (born 1965 in Frankfurt am Main) has created a consistent body of work that is largely on paper and yet cannot be readily understood as drawing. This is because nothing representational is captured or captured and preserved in the artistic representation. Instead, her works on paper - often monumental views of bodies, portraits, architecture and urban landscapes - seem to push their subjects to the edge of dissolution, of liquefaction. The use of painterly means corresponds to this intended leap into the approximate. For her large-format ink drawings, she has constructed a fully mobile work table in order to be able to direct the flowing ink in all directions. She has spent years refining innovative working techniques in order to constantly explore a harmonious balance between the predictable and the accidental.
Thus, nothing in her paintings appears to be in a fixed position; everything in terms of contour could in principle also run in other tracks. Doublings, linear shifts, accumulations of pigment, gradients of light and dark contrasts reveal a degree of contingency that makes what is depicted alien to us and yet lends itself to contemplative contemplation to an increased degree. Instead of providing ready-made projections, Lumer develops projection surfaces whose vagueness and delicacy we as viewers can never relate to as if what we see could be interpreted as a formulation of something already known. In front of Lumer's pictures, we enter uncharted territory and have to slowly make our way through tear-like streaks, large empty spaces and the precisely formulated contours that appear in them in order to gradually build up a relationship to what we see. While the majority of contemporary figuration hangs on the drip of narration, Lumer's pictures fundamentally refuse to be connected to a continuing narrative - nor do they need it. In auratic autonomy, the works stoically insist on the insight that nothing means anything on its own, that a picture only comes to life anyway if it succeeds in creating a space in which the viewer can recognize himself as meant without having already passed through it in its entirety. In contrast to the flood of images that wash over us every day, to the permanent senseless reassurance of ourselves in the never-ending production and dissemination of banal self-portraits (aptly called selfies), Lumer's image layers show what could be done to counter this stultifying, world-spanning image machine from an artistic perspective. Self-knowledge cannot mature in the zone where the familiar is constantly perpetuated as novelty, but only where we are granted the space to enter into an unbiased relationship with the unfamiliar, the foreign, the other - and it is precisely in this zone that Britta Lumer's work has its place.

Britta Lumer lives and works in Berlin. From 1992 to 1996 she studied at the Städelschule in Berlin under Georg Herold and Per Kirkeby. She then studied at the Kunstakademi in Bergen/Norway with Luc Tuymans and Lawrence Weiner until 1997.

Her works have been shown: at the Arthena Art Foundation I Kai 10 in Düsseldorf (2023), Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz (2023); Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Galerie Georg Nothelfer Berlin (2023,2022.2021) at Brandenburgischer Kunstverein, Potsdam (2017); at the Institut für Moderne Kunst, Nuremberg, Hunter College Art Galleries NY (2008) and many more.

They are in the following public collections: Deutsche Bank Collection; Kunstmuseum Basel, Museum für Gegenwartskunst; Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett Berlin; Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Kupferstich Kabinett Dresden; Kunstsammlungen der Stadt Chemnitz; Hessische Kulturstiftung; Agnes Gund Foundation, NYC and others.

Read more: www.brittalumer.de
See more: www.instagram.com

about Margit Seiler: Eine bestimmte Zärtlichkeit , Jean-Christophe Ammann in "Kunst? Ja, Kunst"; Westendverlag, Frankfurt 2014 :

In 1999, the journalist Heinz Scholz asked Margit Seiler: "What role do feet play in your life?" The artist replied: "Feet are our means of transportation. Feet are the part of the body furthest away from the head, thus forming the antithesis to an intellectual view of things, to rationality and reason. Feet are very individual, comparable to the face and hands, but a part of the body that is usually hidden and receives little attention. This gives them a very intimate quality. Feet can also be very beautiful and imply eroticism in a way. I like to look at people's feet, their gait and footwear, and also the way and where a shoe is bulging. I have a shoe addiction, like to paint my toenails, love to look at the curvature of toes and the spaces between them - sometimes as a form of reflection and contemplation.
At a Biennale in Venice many years ago, Oliviero Toscani - who created the evocative Benetton posters in the second half of the 1990s - showed a room paved with color photos showing the naked pelvises of people of all ages from the front. The first thing that caught the eye was, of course, the sex or pubic area. At second glance, a completely different situation emerged, namely the similarity and diversity of the pelvic construction and the thighs. In other words, Toscani was concerned with the physiognomy that Margit Seiler also speaks of.

Her sculptures in aerated concrete (Y-tong) are light in weight, almost 1:1 in scale. The light gray of the porous, polished surface invites you to touch them. Yes, there is an eroticism of touch, especially in view of the steeply raised feet, the female torsos, the pregnant bellies, the knee joints in upright legs, the melon round, slightly offset buttocks, of which Margit Seiler once said with a laugh that she found one butt a little vulgar.If you ever look at sculptures in the spacious stairwells of Renaissance buildings in Italy, for example, you will notice that certain parts of the body have a hint of dark patina. It could be the toes, a heel, a bosom. People have been touching these areas for centuries, absent-mindedly but with the instinct that the circular touch would bring good luck or avert disaster.
Margit Seiler has found the haptic quality for the eroticism of physiognomy. A work of art should not be touched. But touching with the eyes is not only permitted, it is an immanent necessity of desire. Touching with the eyes means imaginatively embracing, scanning, encircling: This porous surface on which one does not slip, on which one inhales the pores, as it were, feeling them.

Margit Seiler (born 1968 in Marburg) studied from 1991 to 1997 at the Städelschule in Frankfurt under Ulrich Rückriem and Thomas Bayrle. Her works are represented in the collection of the Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt and the State of Hesse, among others. She lives and works in Berlin.

Read more:
www.margitseiler.de

Exhibition
Britta Lumer, Margit Seiler
More than the sum of its parts
Aug 30 - Sep 22

Contact
Dr. Robert Bock
Schulstraße 1A
60594 Frankfurt am Main

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