Wirkus Pries - ARBUZ
27.04. - 16.06.2019
Vernissage: 26.04., 19 clock
Opening hours: Tuesday to Sunday from 11am to 6pm
Finissage: 16.06.
11 clock: conversation with Maja Wirkus and Eric Pries
The Kasseler Kunstverein is showing the first joint exhibition by Maja Wirkus and Eric Pries. The installations and collages especially created for Kassel reflect their previous work and exhibition practice as well as their means of questioning spaces as bearers of memories. Photography – and its peripherals – always acts as the starting point.
"We look for pictorial structures, specific conditions of materials and text layers that allow us to investigate the reciprocity and interdependence of different experiential spaces." ARBUZ is one such space in which Wirkus & Pries artistic approach leans towards architecture.
Concrete, as a collage, traces paths, roads, technical models and the open spaces in them. A wall gives space while taking up space. A multimedia installation between image, text and object renders the processes of their artistic research visible.
"ARBUZ is a telling of spaces between fragments, inside discontinuities and near abandonment. For our artistic exploration these spaces are productive places. We look for narratives, not empty phrases."
In this sense, ARBUZ will change over time: photographs and objects will be added, removed, repositioned and the exhibition architecture modified.
The exhibition is sponsored by the Cultural Office of Kassel, Dr. Ing. Wolfgang Zippel Foundation, the Hessian Ministry of Science and Art and the Foundation Kunstfonds.
MAJA WIRKUS
Maja Wirkus, born in 1980, lives and works in Berlin and Warsaw
Studied Experimental Photography at the Kunsthochschule Kassel, where she graduated with honors in 2014. She founded the producer gallery Loyal in Kassel in 2004 and managed it until 2006.
The research project on the architect and artist group Praesens began in Warsaw in 2013 and was supported by the Otto Braun Foundation scholarship until 2014. Wirkus continued the research with the support of the DAAD in Wrocław and a scholarship of the Hessian Cultural Foundation in New York in 2018.
ERIC PRIES
Eric Pries, born in 1975, lives and works in Kassel and Warsaw
Studied Fine Arts at the Kunsthochschule Kassel, and graduated with honors in 2015.
Their work has been shown at the Haus der Photographie / Deichtorhallen in Hamburg (2016/2018), at the Kunstverein am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz in Berlin (2018), Studio 1, Kunstquartier Bethanien in Berlin (2017), at C/O Berlin (2016 ), the Fridericianum in Kassel (2016) and the Goethe Institute in Mexico City (2016).