Carina Brandes / Florian Krewer / Raphaela Simon
Es liebt Dich und Deine Körperlichkeit ein Verwirrter
10.12.2022 – 19.2.2023

Questions about bodily self-determination and self-realization, which began with the “sexual liberation” movement in the 1960s, dominate the current scientific and political discourse as well as daily life in our society. In recent decades, conventional notions of how bodies should look, behave, or be represented have become increasingly flexible and fluid. Today, digital and social media are also giving rise to new normative notions of bodies that affect our self-image as well as our perception of others around us. Artists are also experimenting with an artificial self with mutable bodies that can take on a wide range of forms in an associative and unhindered manner.

This exhibition features works by three artists born in the 1980s in what are generally considered the traditional media of painting, sculpture, and photography. In the conceptual space created by three loosely linked solo exhibitions, the individual becomes physically and mentally what they potentially represent or could be. On the visual level, the relationship between real physicality and the abstract psyche is taken up and varied as a motif.

Carina Brandes (*1982 in Braunschweig, studied at the HfBK Braunschweig, lives and works in Leipzig), Florian Krewer (*1986 in Gerolstein, studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, lives and works in New York), and Raphaela Simon (*1986 in Villingen, studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, lives and works in Berlin) engage with corporeality as a changing experience of constant pleasure and burden, as an oscillation between attraction and repression, closeness and distance. The poles are the individual subjects and the group as a utopian place of longing in which the individual strives to become part of a larger whole.

The artists do not define anything final in their art, and instead search for the reason for the existence of things and bodies, the conditions of being human as the opposite of or commentary on digitality. The body as an object of longing is possibility and limitation in one, freedom and submission, matter and mind. At the same time, it is an original subject that is always there and carries us through space and time.

The title of the exhibition comes from an album by the band Workshop (Stephan Abry, Kai Althoff, Stefan Mohr, Christoph Rath), which was released in 2001 in Cologne: Es liebt Dich und Deine Körperlichkeit ein Ausgeflippter .

The exhibition is curated by Gregor Jansen and Alicia Holthausen.

Opening: December 9th, 2022