Clare Goodwin feat. WeAreTheArtists feat. Mircea Nicolae feat. Conrad Ventur

May 6 – June 17 2012

Painting is Clare Goodwin’s preferred medium. To be more precise: a formal, exact and severe hard-edge variation of it. The focus of this exhibition, however, is neither on the formal strength nor the high degree of abstraction in her paintings, but on their emotional quality. Therefore, in close cooperation with Goodwin, two other artists who deal with this issue in their own ways have been invited. The result, on display at Kunsthalle now is a sort of artistic triad that allows Goodwin’s work to be seen from an unconventional point of view.
The particular atmosphere emanating from Goodwin’s paintings is primarily a result of the fact that she portrays real people in them; secondly, it derives from the use of a palette and the selection of patterns from the 1970s and 1980s, by which means she finds an abstract and universal visual language for the past. The representation of human beings and the look back into the past are indeed the parameters that are also centre-stage in the works by Mircea Nicolae und Conrad Ventur. In his video Romanian Kiosk Company (2010), Nicolae combines a narration about his family with a review of Romanian history after the Second World War. Very intimate details mingle with historical facts, and together they impressively demonstrate how history writes itself into the biographies of people. Finally, a subtle spice of melancholy is inherent in Conrad Ventur’s video installation 13 Most Beautiful / Screen Tests Revisited (2008-2011); 45 years after Andy Warhols legendary Screen Tests, Ventur filmed 13 protagonists in the same style again. The re-enactment reactivates the original quality of Warhol’s original work, but at the same time associates this quality via the individual protagonists to the aura of a glamorous and art historically significant past. On the occasion of the show, a new issue of the beloved free newspaper WeAreTheArtists has been published, including the brand new photo story Couch Curator.

Oliver Kielmayer