Samuel Leuenberger

Tyra Tingleff + Ströme (2015) exhibition photos

25 May 2015

Showing alongside and in parallel with each other at Birsfelden’s SALTS between January 31 and March 13, a solo exhibition by Tyra Tingleff and a joint one by Gina Folly and Mandla Reuter are connected by their position in relation to movement, or lack there of. With a press release subtitled ‘Timeless’, Tingleff’s Closer Scrub is neither about emptiness, nor is it motionless. Within her impressionist paintings hung across two white-walled rooms, there is a variation in brightness, hue and saturation, that speaks to a layering of events. Time can be ceased and compressed with a huge number of episodes, images and information; each scratched and tortured canvas is imbued with these on a timeline, their meaning embedded in each brushstroke. It’s a collision of data within a linearity that disrupts  a ‘natural’ flow of time.

Tyra Tingleff, Closer Scrubs (2015) @ SALTS. Exhibition view. Photo by Gunnar Meier. Courtesy the artist.
Tyra Tingleff, Closer Scrub (2015) @ SALTS. Exhibition view. Photo by Gunnar Meier. Courtesy the artist.

Folly and Reuter’s shared Ströme (German for ‘streams’, or ‘currents’) exhibition on the other hand, explores nature as its theme but not nature itself. Instead, theirs is a copied or conceptualised idea of the ‘natural’ in contemporary urban areas. Throughout the works, both artists focus on these artificial representations in pieces made of polycarbonate, stainless-steel, even a Sodium-vapor lamp. In response to a constructed world of artificial infrastructure, these are industrial materials that rely on natural elements to produce them.

Folly’s work, particularly, investigates the modern zoos or animal parks mirroring the fantasy of the natural world in the Magic Box (2015) series and a projection of a rainforest on a wall in So Far (2014). The boxes are food containers for monkeys foraging in captivity, giving a simplified version of natural events. Meanwhile, Reuter presents an ancient manhole cover that indicates the existence of a stream of water underneath. It acts as a medium separating an invisible underground from its visible, man-made, surface. A cover for this hidden artificial infrastructure of a stream captured for the sake of supporting a human population, the current of cultural exchange is embodied in this water shipped from Iquitos, Peru, via Lima to Rotterdam.

Gina Folly + Mandla Reuter, 'Ströme' (2015) @ SALTS. Exhibition view. Photo by Gunnar Meier. Courtesy the artists.
Gina Folly + Mandla Reuter, Ströme‘ (2015) @ SALTS. Exhibition view. Photo by Gunnar Meier. Courtesy the artists.

It’s this sort of flow and motion of cultural production that draws both Ströme and Closer Scrub together. Where Reuter’s bright yellow gas lamp imitates time shifting from night to day, as well as a day-light lamp enhancing the natural light that already exists, Tingleff’s Closer Scrub obscures a sense of time, or duration in action. Both generate a surreal state separating the gallery space from the outside, which in this case is nature. **

Tyra Tingleff’s Closer Scrub and Gina Folly + Mandla Reuter’s Ströme was on at Birsfelden’s SALTS, running January 31 to March 13, 2015.

Header image: Gina Folly + Mandla Reuter, Ströme‘ (2015) @ SALTS. Exhibition view. Photo by Gunnar Meier. Courtesy the artists.

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Associations New @ SALTS (2014) exhibition photos

18 November 2014

An 18th-century bourgeois salon-hang for the 21st-century privilege of art production. The material parallels between the seemingly long-outdated practice of showing off a painting collection to friends and business associates in the semi-private surounds of a French living room and the nature of art display via a desktop are uncannily similar. That’s something curators Samuel Leuenberger and Elise Lammer picked up on with “cluster hung painting show” Associations New at Birsfelden’s SALTS, running from October 4 to December 8.

Associations New (2014) a cluster hung painting show @ SALTS. Installation view. Photos by Gunnar Meier. Courtesy the gallery.
Associations New (2014) a cluster hung painting show @ SALTS. Installation view. Photos by Gunnar Meier. Courtesy the gallery.

Featuring the work of 25 artists from their personal networks, Leuenberger and Lammer sought contributions of one to three paintings – from gouache on paper, egg-tempera, acrylic and oil on canvas – under 50 x 50 cm, to be hung in the kind of clusters that reduce the relevance of an individual work to being only an element of a greater display of an Enlightened household’s cultural (and economic) wealth. Now compare that with the appropriated images of a private blog or Tumblr scroll, where a personal aesthetic is publicly presented via online networks that are restricted to an audience educated in a particular cultural language, with access to and an understanding of the internet.

In the photos from Associations New, only a handful of them feature the credited work of individual arists, including Charlotte Herzig‘s ‘Landscape, the sun is actually red’ (2014) and Henning Strassburger‘s ‘o.T’ (2014), that yells “LOOK WHAT I PAINT” in black scrawl through the lurid pink and black noise of oil and acrylic. The rest are reduced to an ‘installation view’ of wall-hung paintings by the likes of Max Brand, Claudia Comte, Thomas Jeppe, Jan Kiefer and more, while a link to Pauline Beaudemont‘s concurrent L’Age D’or exhibition next door comes in two square concrete ‘chairs’, designed for the almost empty garage cubicles outside.

Associations New (2014) a cluster hung painting show @ SALTS. Installation view. Photos by Gunnar Meier. Courtesy the gallery.
Associations New (2014) a cluster hung painting show @ SALTS. Installation view. Photos by Gunnar Meier. Courtesy the gallery.

Each block seat features a quote from a film and a fiction work: one from Jacques Tati epic Play Time (1967) on a future vision of Parisian modernity and the other from objectivist Ayn Rand’s famous novel The Fountainhead. It’s taken from the part of the book where vulgar publisher and passionate private art collector Gail Wynand offers indvidualistic modernist architect a contract while announcing, “You will take your spectacular talent and make it subservient to the taste of the masses.”

As per the press release, the ‘salon’ concept also refers to the official art exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts, Salon de Paris, initiated by Louis XIV in 1667. This idea of ceiling-to-floor presentations of paintings was developed in response to lack of space and became not only an exhibition of wealth but an instrument of political power. These days that display comes in the manner of privately-funded public institutions, branded art fairs and corporatised content-sharing platforms. **

Associations New group exhibition is on at Birsfelden’s SALTS, running October 4 to December 8, 2015.

Header image: Associations New (2014) a cluster hung painting show @ SALTS. Installation view. Photos by Gunnar Meier. Courtesy the gallery.

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