Lecture & Speech
Selected Lectures & Opening Speeches
Platoon Kunsthalle, Berlin - "Wine Taste Event"
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For the online magazine „Weinkrake“ I gave a lecture at a Wine & Taste Event 2015 at the Platoon Kunsthalle Berlin about the encounter of art and wine on wine bottle labels and the symbolic dimension of the aesthetic experience of art and design.
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My lecture was not recorded, but the video gives an impression of the event.
Speaker, Brandfilm Le Manoir Cream Manufactory,
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During my time of full-time employment as Creative Director at Le Manoir Cream Manufactory conceived the company's imagefilm and presented the corporate mission as a speaker. I also represent the company at press dinners, events, etc.
Kunsthaus Frankenthal - Günther Titz, "Out of the dark", 2015
"Out of the dark' is the title of the exhibition by Günther Titz, into which I may introduce the content today. "Out of the dark" is a guiding principle for Günther Titz's art: it illuminates, exposes, makes visible. To bring something out of the darkness implies that something is already there, hidden - it must be found and brought into the light. This process of making something visible becomes particularly clear in Günther Titz' paintings and can be observed already in the process of their creation. He works with simple brown cardboard boxes, whose imprints, so to speak, dictate the composition of his works. Where there is an inscription on the cardboard - a number, digits, combinations of numbers and letters - he paints it over with a coloured stripe; the placement and width of the respective coloured stripe thus depends on the placement and size of the respective inscription. The rest of the cardboard surface is painted over with white paint and the cardboard as such is no longer visible. At this point Günther Titz grinds off parts of the paint again... exposes parts of the cardboard so that it can be seen in fragments and/or shimmers through a transparent layer of paint. For example, we can read "Carton No. 401" on a work. The cardboard is thus present, but torn from its functional context. The finished painting is created by a system, an order, which is already inherent in the cardboard - predetermined by its function, which in turn determines its format and inscription. The original system of order is thus transformed."
The complete german speech manuscript of "Günter Titz, "Out of the dark", Copyright Katharina Arimont, is available here.
Galerie Schrade, Karlsruhe - Nathalia Edenmont, "Blüten des Lebens", 2015
Excerpt from my opening statement:
"Nathalia Edenmont's photographs are beautiful: fascinating, disturbing, even sadly beautiful. She arranges still lifes of women, children, men, butterflies and flowers in the style of old masters, quoting well-known elements of Christian iconography and art history. It is the transience of our existence that she alludes to and plays with; the cut flowers in her photographs are dead, but they are beautiful. So are the butterflies. Their beauty is generally sublime; they often live for only two or three days. So beauty does not live close to God, but close to risk, close to destruction and close to death. Nathalia Edenmont plays with this aesthetic of the grotesque. And she provokes, deliberately crosses the boundaries of our norms. Her photographs seduce and confront us with ourselves, with our own perception and with our personal values. She creates a surreal reality in her photographs by depicting our reality, and she does so 'unvarnished'. Nathalia Edenmont works analog, with real materials and with a large front camera, with different lenses and an 8 x 10 inch flat film, which she imports from the USA."
Galerie tuttiart, Luzern - Kejoo Park, "Silberlandschaften", 2015
Excerpt from my opening statement:
"Kejoo Park was born in Korea and trained as a painter, architect and landscape architect at Pratt, Cornell and Harvard. Her pictorial works are a synthesis of these three fields; her theme is man's alienation from nature and thus from him-/herself. She shows this alienation both thematically and in her choice of materials.
In the style of informal painting, she initially expresses inner feelings without striving for a composition in the picture, in order to subsequently anchor this "inner nature" in a complex system of pictorial representation. Her calligraphic, sweeping style is influenced by Asian traditional calligraphy, but - as she says herself - it represents a personal, calligraphic language.
For some years, Kejoo Park has been using a wide variety of techniques and materials: acrylic paint applied gesturally with brushes and spatulas on canvas, overlaid with natural elements such as pine needles; aluminium plates act as picture carriers; collage technique is used; elements sprayed on with stencils irritate the scenery, which is increasingly composed.