Artists: Claus Brunsmann, Mariana Hahn, Thorsten Heinze, Miru Kim, Kate McMillan,
Jesus Pastor, Shingo Yoshida
Curators: Constanze Kleiner, Rachel Rits-Volloch and Stephan von Wiese

With it’s second exhibition, “The Landscape Inside Us”, Schlachthaus. fresh&fine art addresses the depiction of landscape, both inner and external, as a narrative process and a contemplative experience.

The gallery presents a complex series of works consisting of sixteen large-format paintings by Berlin-based painter Claus Brunsmann. These works pictorially intermix the inner and outer life. Within the act of painting, figurative objects are impulsively deconstructed while contents are intensified. Glaring surfaces are revealed by sharp incisions and turned into unexpected forms while new contexts arise. The oeuvre of Claus Brunsmann of the past 10 years is of significant matter and characterised by an increasing density. This concentration of energy provokes the artist into the unleashing of colour, creating an unmistakable power in the works of a painter who’s recurrent topic has been the role of art as the incarnation of ritual and spirituality.  Claus Brunsmann had been Jannis Kounellis’ master student at the Academy Of Fine Arts in Düsseldorf, and in 2015 Brunsmann was given a major retrospective in Hamburg entitled “Distorted Memories of Nature“.

This exhibition, “The Landscape Inside Us”, brings Brunsmann’s explosive paintings into dialogue with works by five diverse international artists. In Mariana Hahn’s contemplative landscape work „I too am a monk, I too am the sea“, the photo installation displays the artist wearing a monk-like robe while standing in front of the vastness of the sea, the mythical element of origin. This is Hahn’s examination of artist Caspar David Friedrich’s Romantic work „The Monk by the Sea“.

The same confrontation with the elements of origin can be found in New York-based Korean artist Miru Kim’s series of colour photographs “The Camel’s Way“. In Kim’s photoseries, the artist exposes herself naked within the vastness of the desert. The fragility of her figure and poise, calm despite the surrounding severity, reflects on the equal destructibility of her environment. Again, the metaphor of landscape becomes the expression for inner experience.

Similarly extreme landscapes are the subjects of Japanese filmmaker and photo artist Shingo Yoshida’s photographs. Travelling to the extremes of the earth, he searches for places which are loaded with myths, such as the spot in Siberia where the 180th meridian and the Arctic Circle intersect. Capturing the vastness of the landscape, Yoshida’s images ask us to confront our transient imprint upon it.

The three part photo edition entitled „The Vast Structure of Recollection“ by Australian artist Kate McMillan explores the artist’s fascination with the relationship between body memory and landscape. Using film, photography and sculpture, McMillan explores how the intense residue of memory can be located through quiet gesture, landscape, and the objects we carry around with us. Exploring internal and external landscapes alike, McMillan’s practice encompasses an open-ended dialogue between abstraction, felt experience and memory; a sort of visual poem.

The Spanish documentation photographer Jesus Pastor captures remote, stony paths from Iceland. Like a mantra, the motif of stone and precipice repeats itself, focusing on a single detail of the landscape to arouse the viewer’s imagination.

The most distinctive human landscape is the palm of the hand. The portraits of Marcel Marceau in the exhibition show nothing more than the palms of his hands. The photographer, Thorsten Heinze, was once Marceau’s spiritual guide, student, assistant, friend and close companion on the world’s stages for 17 years. These moving moments form images of inner experience.

„Die Landschaft in uns“ by Schlachthaus.fresh&fine art is a cooperation with SevenStarGallery and Momentum Berlin.
www.schlachthaus-ffa.com 
www.sevenstargallery.com I www.momentumworldwide.com