Events/Openings

Sherin Najjar opens the group exhibition CALM HEAVEN ON EARTH showcasing the latest work from the German painter Sabine Friesicke and presenting the Berlin debut of the Japanese artists Junko Otake and Maki Umehara. Working with site-specific installations, large-scale paintings, collages and works on paper, the three artists deal with the coding, decoding and recoding of information.

In her sculptural work, Maki Umehara (born 1976) uses large textile panels. Her approach to materiality has a long Japanese tradition. Textiles are regarded as an important media of contemporary art. With her use of the Kichō on the other hand, a portable curtain used by aristocratic Japanese women in the 19th century to maintain their private sphere, the artist turns to the past. In her work “Coloured Batik,“ Umehara used an African-patterned material produced in Holland which she printed with silver paint. The colours, brilliant on one side, lay pale on the other, as if though under wax. This is itself, a minimal gesture. The viewer remains unclear as front and back. Umehara allows a complex process of geographical migration involving forms, techniques and colonial references to fall together before transferring this archaeological process onto the Kichō in an Asiatic context. Junko Otake (born 1979) embosses thought bubbles from ten classic comics onto hand-made paper. The “thought bubble” has a long tradition in art history. After their introduction as the accompaniment to graphic stories in the 19th century, post-modernity raised them to the status of a Pop-Art feature. Otake leaves her bubbles empty. With the bubble form indicating the act of thinking, what is actually thought and by whom remains unknown. The large-format paintings from Sabine Friesicke (born in 1960) refer to the colour-coding of the world. Using liquid paint, she places glazed vertical lines over horizontal lines and paint traces and weaves the different picture layers within each other. Friesicke uses paint from the American manufacturer Moore, which themselves make prosaic promises. We cannot order colours such as light blue or pink, but “Unspoken Love (1269)” “Sheer Romance (837)” “Heaven on Earth (1661),” or “Calm (2111-70)”, evoking the romantic conceptions suggested by the names of the paint. Friesicke covers these absurd fictions with linear forms which themselves taking the appearance of writing, run into geometric patterns.

A catalogue will be published on the occasion of this exhibition.

The artists Sabine Friesicke, Junko Otake, Maki Umehara in converstion with curator Stefan Weppelmann, Friday 14 September, 6-7H. (Seats are limited. RSVP contact@sherinnajjar.com)

For further information and picture material, please contact Galerie Sherin Najjar: contact@sherinnajjar.com