Exhibitions

In the permanent, visual investigation of spatially and temporally recurring motions, Arne Schreiber connects specified courses of action with the individual conditions of his object-like paintings as well as the exhibition space. The process of repetition, of re-executing a physical movement, reveals itself as accumulation, as fragment and detail, as persisting latitude in translation and interpretation of a pre-existing concept. Thus specific references to classical painting meet head-on with questions concerning the authorship of an artwork.

Arne Schreiber shows an installation of room dividers consisting of used doors and two-sided mirrors. A wall-like, free-standing paravent, the individual modular elements of which are mutually stabilising, modifies the perception of the exhibition space, divides and mirrors the room into various aspects and surfaces, integrating the architecture as part of the pictorial surface. The smooth, industrial surfaces of the mirrors, while providing illusions of space, stand in stark contrast to the more substantial surfaces of the door elements and the signs of wear and tear they bear. The different wings of the paravent, as image carriers of a linear, line by line manually repeating painting in classical oil paints, form spaces of reference in which even the smallest changes in structure become visible. Imperfections and differences manifest themselves in the regularity of the execution. Only the extreme withdrawal of the artist as author makes the observation of the various media and their roles within the process possible at all.

The paravent installation is accompanied by the eponymous text drawing nowhere – herenow as well as the drawing apartagain. Based on a grid with a continuously repeating alphabet of industrial letter stencils, the letters needed for the text proper are marked on the paper. Subsequently the blank space around the letters is filled in with drawing in graphite pencil. The resulting text surfaces can be regarded as fields of individual signs or as continuous text. The drawings illustrate aspects of the visualisation of writing and the textualisation of images, of the differences and similarities of reading and seeing, of writing and drawing. It is all but inevitable that the titles’ readings oscillate between “no-where” and “now-here” as well as “a part again” and “apart again.”