OUT NOW: König Galerie x Fräulein 2021 Calender

Chiharu Shota

Through her installation artist, Shiota confronts fundamental human concerns such as life, death and relationships. Her exhibition “Navigating The Unknown” evolves around the questions of how does one consist in a world with daily floods of information ever changing? Where is the surface in this ocean of information? What is our purpose? Where is our destination in life? The architectural shape of the boats let passengers move forward. The struggle is to define a path with no safe point of orientation and without a sense of direction.

Helen Marten

Marten combines sculptures, paintings and writings to question the stability of the material world and our place within it. She gives physical shape to things that do not necessarily have one: the notions of labor and work, the emotional capacity of paint, or the verbal distortions of language. Her material language is tangentially spun out but always rooted to a diagrammatic logic and her work follows an almost obsessive strategic use of layering and contingency. “Fixed Sky Situation” unfolds a ‘them’ sculpture, an ‘us’ sculpture, and a ‘you’ sculpture. Each explores conditions of exclusion or corroboration and each sculptural work enacts a diagram, making ambivalent social demands on its viewer.All bodies are people and all people preserve to some degree the lines of those who went before them.

Jorinde Voigt

Voigt’s drawings and sculptural works depict how one’s inner world – like personal experience, emotion and memory – intersects with external conditions. In her exhibition “The Real Extend” Voigt continues these investigations. An ongoing hypnotic series of paintings articulate an ever expanding lexicon of forms. The torus is a recurring motif, a donut shape that lacks a clear boundary between inside and outside. For the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, the topology of this form demonstrates how the unconscious is not only an interior psychic system, but also intersubjective by nature.

Kathryn Andrews

In her work, containing 2-D works and sculptures, Andrews explores histories of dominance and ways in which social power structures influence culture. The artist often incorporates images and artefacts mass media, commercial products, advertising, the entertainment industry and citations from canonical Western art history. Through the strategies of pop art and minimalism she interrogates these modes of production, in an effort to highlight how aesthetics are used to influence perception and, in turn, consumption tendencies. At the center of her exhibition “Circus Empire” looms: a circus tent 7.5 m in height, both occupying and housing within the gallery.

Camille Henrot

Her exhibition “The Pale Fox” tells the story of the fox Ogo who is filled with sadness because he, unlike all of his other companions, was born without any siblings and emerged from the womb alone. First his loneliness turns into sadness, then into anger and his anger finally turns into chaos. As unrealistic as it sounds, to Ogo the fox we owe the title of a large study, published in 1965, by Germaine Dieterlen and Marcel Griaule, of the cosmogony and cosmology of the Dogon tribe of Burkina Faso and western Mali. Inspired by both this figure of disruptive imbalance and the ethnographical context Henrot presents a room-sized architectural display system filled with found and constructed materials and objects.

Amalia Pica

Pica’s works suggest systems of exchange, transmission and reception of information. She draws on the issues of communication – both verbal and non verbal – and explores how systems and modes of language are functioning. Her sculptures, photographs, installations, performances and videos are wordless narratives and an invitation to reflect on the construction, composition and effectiveness of all narrative and all language: in short, a visual semiotics.

Tatiana Trouvé

Trouvé’s artist portfolio includes drawings, bronze sculptures and architectural installations. She blends domestic spaces with natural ones, making the inside and the outside indistinguishable. She marries the two dimensions of drawings and the three dimensions of volumes. As a result, she turns the laws and orders of our reality upside down and often leaves us in disorientation. “Waterfall” is a fountain sculpture that shows an old-fashioned and shabby looking mattress hanging limply off the wall’s side with water dripping from the buttons. In a very poetic way, Trouvé transformed a private everyday object into a public art exhibit.

Katharina Grosse

The artist is known for her very special conception of painting, stating that paint can precipitate everywhere and anywhere on any surface and any object that sprayed paint can reach. Her exhibition “At 30 Paces She Could Split A Playing Card” consists of large-format works on canvas and plywood, that Grosse created in Berlin and New Zealand. Both locations are represented through different styles of painting and differing family resemblances. The canvasses, which were painted in her studio in Berlin, are dominated by chromaticity of broad, transparent swatches of color blended into one another. The plywood on the other hand, which the artist painted in New Zealand, consists of multi-colored sharply separated paint slashes that are being juxtaposed with a largely black portion.

Monica Bonvicini

In her work Bonvicini critically investigates, assesses and mocks vulnerable and flawed parts of our society. She points out discrimination, bigotry and misogyny that she picks up in everyday situations. The “Guilt” exhibition brings her back to the language-based works she is known for through previous exhibitions and public art commissions worldwide. “Guilt” draws on images of masulinity and class – the social factors that play a key role in the abuse of power.

Annette Kelm

In her photography the artist deals with the function and design of objects. She often combines several genres into single images or develops a single motif across serial images to combine a variety of artistic, historical and cross-cultural references. On the first glance Kelm’s still life and studio photography seems to be a thrivingly sober presentation of things. But on the second look her strictly formal visual language with its neutral light and objective view gives them an extraordinary presence and frees the objects form their purely factual context.

Claudia Comte

Comte’s work is defined by her strong interest in the memory of materials. For example, frozen wood is still very well preserved and even after 4,000 years will “remember” climate conditions. The artist is best known for her site-specific installations wherein each artwork specifically relates to one another. Her minimalistic approach is both methodical and dynamic and her results are always playful. Her artworks incorporate a diverse range of mediums from sculpture, to painting, to various multimedia installations.

Alicja Kwade

The work of the Berlin-based artist repeatedly explores scientific questionings and offers poetic and intuitively comprehensible responses. Her “Entitas Exhibiton” evolved around Göthe’s well known question: “What is it that binds together the world’s innermost core?” Her answer: nothing. All surfaces, may it be marble or diamonds, may appear to have hard and massive structures, but really only consist of a series of atoms, which in turn contain of nothing. Their remaining area is nothingness.

The 2021 Women in Art calendar can be found on the König Souvenir Shop , both in person and online.
Keep your eyes here for the month of December. Perhaps the spirit of giving will move through us! 

Text by Ann-Kathrin Lietz