Events/Openings

Richard Wright
Year-long exhibition 15.02.2014 – 14.02.2015
“Nine Chains To The Moon” (Chapter 2)
Opening: Friday, 02.05.2014, 6–9 pm

On the occasion of the Gallery Weekend Berlin, BQ opens the second part of Richard Wright’s year-long exhibition that has been on display since 14th of February.

Alike the chapter of a book, the second part of the exhibition builds up on the previous one by continuing it in a reflective and interpretive way. Whereas the first part, with its silkscreen prints, works on paper, overworked books, and hand painted posters mounted on the façade of the gallery provided an insight in his creative work, Richard Wright now has added a curatorial aspect to the exhibition by complementing it with works by other artist invited by him. The Glaswegian artist Tony Swain (1967) shows recent work on newspaper pages the illustrations of which are the starting point of his paintings. By integrating them into the context of his visual worlds, Swain renders the short-lived pictorial information into a timeless component of symbolic landscapes. With John Latham (1921 – 2006) and Josef Albers (1888 – 1976), the exhibition includes historical positions dealing with the relativity of any conception of art. While John Latham’s installation “Table with the law” (1988) questions the standardisation of knowledge and ethics by suggesting the fragility of any canon which is submit to social change, his work “THE” (1976) highlights the relation between art, knowledge and time – an example for Latham’s “Event Structure” theory, a philosophy of time proposing that the event, as the departure from the state of nothing, is the basic principle of reality. Also Josef Albers’s presented publication “The Interaction Of Color” (1973; first edition 1963), a compendium of 152 colour plates, is concerned with the sensory und sensuous perception of colours. Differing from traditional colour theories, Albers highlights the relativity of physical qualities, such as brightness, temperature, or transparency of colour, and proofs their dependence not only from the beholder’s psychological constitution but also from the interaction of different combinations of colours as the result of which they emerge. Samuel Beckett’s “Film” (1965) that is presented in the back room of the gallery reflects the relationship between perception and being by staging it as the interaction between the anonymous observant sight of the camera and the protagonist’s self-perception.

Whereas the exhibition inside the gallery space has been complemented mainly by other artists’ contributions, Richard Wright expands his own visual work to the public space outside the gallery. At the Pavilion of the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz (vis-à-vis the gallery), a site-specific mural by Richard Wright subtly interprets the architecture of the square. Above all, this new work provides a link with the façade design of the gallery, thus making painting perceptible as spatial experience and transcending the two-dimensional character of the medium.