January 22– February 20, 2005

Drawings and other paperwork

VTO Gallery – 96 Teesdale Street – London E2 6PU

Curated by Thomas Kilpper in collaboration with Patrick Heide
Opening: January 21, 2005 from 6-10 pm

Lucie Beppler, Bernadette Corporation, Michael Beutler, Heide Deigert, Emmanuel Depoorter, Thomas Erdelmeier, Jeremy Glogan, Alex Hamilton, Thomas Kilpper, Dirk Krecker, Janne Lervik, Max Mason, Nils Norman, Olivia Plender, Miki Tschur, Klaus Weber, Amelie von Wulffen

The exhibition from our cold hands brings together drawings and other works on paper by 17 young artists with a wide variety of working methods and strategies. Works that contradict or complement each other, works that question and explore the limits and possibilities of this medium.

Klaus Weber shows mushroom drawings, which are created in a process lasting several days, solely through the spores of the mushrooms. It is thus quasi a form of “automated drawing” without direct drawing intervention by the artist.

Conversely, Heide Deigert shows distorted self-portraits that look like they were created by a computer, but are actually drawn by hand.

Alex Hamilton takes photographs of the Turner House in East London as a starting point, copies them, retouches and draws them into the copy, copies the drawing again, draws again into the copy and so on, until it is no longer clear how the whole thing was created and how it is to be defined: photo, drawing or copy?

In her comic master-piece, Olivia Plender questions the cliché of the ‘masterpiece’, draws her work in a classical style, but always presents it as a copy. She thus turns the copy into an original work of art and keeps the actual original under lock and key.

In contrast, Micki Tschur, who lives in the USA, shows very personal stories – excerpts from her sketchbook – “unfinished stories” as she calls them – as original drawings.

Norwegian-born Janne Lervik has her diary- and comic-like drawings tell bizarre stories about her adopted home Berlin.

Max Mason will produce an edition in the form of a CD for the exhibition. It contains a soundpiece, a kind of sound drawing that can be heard / ‘seen’ in the exhibition – and a classical drawing that cannot be seen in the exhibition. Only those who purchase the edition can see this drawing – e.g. at home on the screen – for everyone else it remains a virtual picture.

Dirk Krecker cuts the keys of old, mechanical typewriters into the paper and creates a minimalist pictorial language: he transforms the movable letters – printing tools – into his drawing pen and supplies fighter planes for this exhibition that are about to attack or crash.

Emmanuel Depoorter and Thomas Erdelmeier produce large-format drawings – Depoorter rather follows subjective horror and fear scenarios, whereby Erdelmeier’s text images draw us into an exuberant labyrinth of social questions and fields of conflict.

Lucie Beppler, on the other hand, devotes herself intensively to smaller formats with which she circles around complex themes from the personal and intimate – often injuring and rutting her leaves with cutting tools – she ‘draws’, among other things, with a knife. For this exhibition, she has created works on untreated photographic paper that seem to have been created by chance and that evoke associations with telephone scribbles, as most of us have probably done many times before.

Thomas Kilpper drew with the chainsaw by cutting the entire parquet floor of a basketball hall of the US Army and turning it into a printing block for a woodcut. In this exhibition he shows the former Nazi secret service officers around Reinhard Gehlen, who after the war were ‘trained’ by the CIA to become agents of the Federal Intelligence Service at this location – near Frankfurt.

From a technical point of view, Nils Norman is quite in the present day: in his illustrations he draws primarily on the computer and its software: his pencil is the mouse. With it, he develops a system-critical pictorial world in which his ironic suggestions for repairs and improvements to various social problems flow into.

The artist group Bernadette Corporation, which lives in Berlin and New York, provides a computer-generated image of a blow-job obtained from the Internet for the exhibition. By pulling it onto canvas and stretcher frame, they also question a central cornerstone of artistic production: to what extent do stretcher frames and canvas help a work become real art and a real value?

Jeremy Glogan seems to be faithful to artistic tradition by using brushes, pencils and pencils – but he plays with the different styles of art history, breaking and discarding his work over and over again.

Amelie von Wulffen does not only integrate photography into her drawings, with her overpaintings she creates a completely new basis for her image production. She builds almost dreamlike spaces in order to dedicate herself to private stories or worn out and questionable personalities like Alexander Solchenyzin with delicate strokes in the next moment.

Michael Beutler builds low-tech machines and will produce and distribute on the floor tenfold enlarged ‘Sunkist-Tetra-Pack-boxes’ for the exhibition. Does he thereby provoke a de-constructive game or is it the occupation or use of space?

Thomas Kilpper
Patrick Heide

More information about:
info@vtogallery.com – http://www.vtogallery.com
patrickheide@hotmail.com or phone ++44 (0)790 0215 317

February 05 – March 13, 2005

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November 5 – 25, 2005

Thomas Kilpper, who lives in Berlin, chooses the most difficult of all paths an artist can take. In his work he does not shy away from large to monumental formats and complex contents. On the other hand, he develops an astonishing variety and love of detail, going into depth.

Kilpper became known to a wider public through his large-format woodcut projects from 1998 to 2000 in empty buildings near Frankfurt and in London.
Here he really worked his way through: the resistance of the parquet floor and its partly comical, partly loaded history. Near Frankfurt it was a former Nazi military camp, which after the war became the site of numerous interrogations and training missions of the US army and where barely two years after the end of the war, with the help of the CIA, the forerunner of the German foreign secret service, the BND, the so-called “Organisation Gehlen”, was launched. Surprisingly, this happened under the same leadership as the Nazi secret service “Fremde Heere Ost”: Reinhard Gehlen.
In London it was a place where an octagonal church was erected in the 18th century, which was radically reused almost a hundred years later: the pulpit was replaced by a boxing ring, in which 30 years of important and popular boxing fights took place – until during the 2nd World War Hitler’s air force reduced the building to rubble and ashes. Orbit House, which was built on the same site after the war, initially served the British Army as a secret location for their printing workshop until the Oriental Department of the British Library moved here and, among other things, kept the oldest known woodcut in the world, the “Diamond Sutra” from China, here.
Kilpper goes to archives, asks local residents or former employees… then he approaches: “With heavy equipment, the ghosts of their own past are carved into the smooth wooden floor, -sawn, -milled, -cut, -chopped, -choped, -choped. Later, the scratched landscape is treated with miraculous artistry. The prints are removed with paint, paper and fabrics.” (Else Gabriel on Thomas Kilpper)

At the invitation of the Goethe-Institut, Kilpper travelled to the occupied territories of Palestine in 2003 and, together with Palestinian youths, built a larger-than-life horse sculpture out of metal from destroyed houses and cars. In the Arab world, the horse is a symbol of freedom and enjoys enormous popularity.
Against constantly recurring curfews, controls, tank and air force deployments, this project was an attempt to reopen play and movement spaces in public space. After its completion, the horse was successfully pulled from checkpoint to checkpoint through the entire West Bank to Ramallah, Arafat’s destroyed seat of government, together with some workshop participants – despite all warnings. As if by a miracle, the horse opened almost all the otherwise locked gates for a brief moment. “You have to see the film Thomas Kilpper made about it.
…made with… The described details of everyday life are full of absurd obstacles, they also deal with great hospitality, and with being settled in temporary as well as hostilities…” (Else Gabriel)

Thomas Kilpper has planned a new installation – bicycle shop – for the Wildwechsel Gallery in Frankfurt.
Bicycles will be offered for sale and defective bikes will be accepted for repair. The gallery owner and art dealer becomes a bicycle seller and bicycle mechanic – the gallery visitor possibly a bicycle buyer or customer of a bicycle repair.
Kilpper wants to question the function and identity of the location as well as the social position of its protagonists – and at the same time encourage a form of ecologically meaningful mobility. The bikes sold during the exhibition are signed by the artist.