Exhibition Lichtenberg Studios December 2019
Shop window, Türrschmidtstr. 24
Berit Myrebøe – Super position
Lynn Pook – Playground
Artist talk and drink: Sunday, 15 December at 5 pm
Exhibition until 2 February 2020
Since 2018 there has been a cooperation between the Lichtenberg Studios and the DIEresidenz, a house near Die, France, where curator Conny Becker lives with her family. Although the house is only 10 minutes away from Die by bike, it is still completely secluded in the “dark” forest. A granny flat and a studio are available for the respective residents. The exchange takes place in August/September, a French resident comes to the Lichtenberg Studios in August and a Berlin artist goes to Die. At the beginning of October an exhibition of the two artists* will take place at the DIEresidenz in the studio. Last year’s exhibition started with Yann Le Crouhennec from Die and Anne Staszkiewicz from Berlin. The “results” of this year’s exchange are now shown in a small section of the showcase.
During her research in Lichtenberg Lynn Pook noticed the playgrounds and especially their diversity and variety. From France, she was used to finding rather uninteresting, often somewhat neglected places that invited little to play or stay. All the more she was fascinated by the creative variety of the facilities and the individual playground equipment, as well as their materiality, mostly wood is used. So Lynn Pook, who also works for theatre productions, started to observe various playgrounds here in the costume area, and in her art she is looking for a physical approach to the playground. She talked to people she met on site and especially looked at how the children appropriated the place created for them, how they moved and which distances they covered. From this research, which was also documented with sketches and photos and which unfortunately cannot be shown in the current exhibition, Lynn Pook developed a choreography which she then realised on film.
Berit Myrebøe creates imaginary landscapes on aluminium or – as in DIEresidenz – on paper by layering images and materials. The technique is reminiscent of avant-garde photography of the 1920s and 1930s, when the photographic superimposition initially resulted from an accident and artists subsequently printed the photographic paper several times or combined several negatives in the development process.
But Myrebøe does more than “just” photography. Rather, she fights against photography by changing this layer by layer. Her works thus begin with a photograph – that of a landscape or a human body. In selecting these “photo-sketches” (according to the artist), she prefers photographs that capture a movement, a moment of transition, that are somewhat indistinct and already have a painterly aspect. “Transition” is a key word in Myrebøe’s working method, because the motif never remains the same.
The artist transfers her photographic sketches onto aluminium plate, using the transfer printing process, a printing technique used in lithography, for example, to turn the mirror-inverted image around. Once on metal, Myrebøe removes the context of her main motif using various solvents and adds layers or elements of oil paint. From this intervention she takes a photograph again, which can be treated in the same way over several cycles.
In Die Myrebøe works on paper, superimposing sheets of different textures, shades of white and transparency. She scratches and rubs away parts of the previously printed, transferred picture base, draws and paints on it with charcoal, chalk, oil paint and paint sprays. By applying varnish or linseed oil, she gains transparent or shiny parts of the picture, thus highlighting or hiding details of the “original” picture – from which she is moving away more and more. In this way, the initial photograph is increasingly transformed into a drawing, collage or painting.
The artist often works serially with the same motif, which she then overlays with different layers and reworks in different ways, each time emphasizing certain elements. The repetition of the motif is reminiscent of film sequences – even though Myrebøe does not tell a story. Rather, they are juxtaposed snapshots, shreds of dreams or memories.
*** Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version) ***