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REPRESSED SECRETS

REPRESSED SECRETS

OPENING: FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 7TH 2020

EXHIBITION: FEBRUARY 8TH – APRIL 3RD 2020

MICHAEL VON BRENTANO

INA KOHLSCHOVSKY

JOSEF LANG

MICHAEL NGUYEN

SIGRID WEVER

Everyone knows them, everybody has them. We are talking about secrets: secrecy of correspondence, medical confidentiality, confessional secrets, family secrets, and state secrets. Secrets are characterized by hidden knowledge, confidentiality, and secrecy.  

Concomitantly, secrets function often as important binders creating social spaces while protecting group reputation. For the German philosopher and sociologist Georg Simmel secrets had an extraordinary meaning: “Secrecy in this sense— i.e., which is effective through negative or positive means of concealment is one of the greatest accomplishments of humanity.” Secrecy also represented for Friedrich Nietzsche the basis for cultural and human progress: “Jede Art von Kultur beginnt damit, dass eine Menge von Dingen verschleiert wird. Der Fortschritt des Menschen hängt an diesem Verschleiern.”

Secrets are also often the invisible glue in private relationships. The amount of shared or hidden secrets is a decisive parameter providing information about the true value and intimacy of a human relationship. 

In the exhibition REPRESSED SECRETS, which opens on February 7th at Haleh Gallery in Berg, five artists reflect in astonishing sculptures, paintings, and photographs upon their personal vision of their local environment. The artists do not only portray the social realities of their own society, but also illuminate its repressed secrets. The sculptor Michael von Brentano mirrors in his complex installations the idea of „theatrum mundi.“ By doing so, he connects the artistic means of collage, drawing, and sculpture with everyday objects and finds. The world theater functions as an artistic metaphor illustrating the complexities of modern knowledge orders and the mysteries of our time. For the painter Ina Kohlschovsky, every image per se represents a mystery or enigma. Thus secrecy transforms in her works into a conceptual pictorial means exerting an immersive effect on the viewer and revealing the painting’s hidden secrecy. Not only the paintings, but also Josef Lang’s sculptures remain a mystery. Lang’s monochromatic sculptures inhabit our environment, his figures, however, seem lost in self-contemplation and reveal the beholder nothing of their inner life. 

Michael Nguyen’s art works are based on photographs digitally processed in the artistic process. With his subjective perspective, the artist succeeds to make hidden details visible, which might have remained hidden employing a simple reproduction of reality. 

Another secrecy can be found in the exhibition in Sigrid Wever’s immaterial and abstract painting. For weeks, the painter applies ultra-thin layers of liquid acrylic paint on thin cotton fabrics. Thus she creates a moving and vivid colour field, however, without solid forms and beyond any boundaries, as the artist explains in her own words: “An intangible, ambiguously identifiable, indescribable pictorial space – breathing and diffuse. With its calm presence, it seems as if the pictorial space conceals a secret.”

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