ART COLOGNE 2019

For the gallery’s fourth participation in the Neumarkt section at Art Cologne,

Deborah Schamoni is very delighted to present recent works by

Gerry Bibby, Judith Hopf, KAYA and Tobias Spichtig.

Judith Hopf often addresses subjects that point to the politics of art making, to different group dynamics, and to the impact of technology on human gestures and behaviors. Through sculpture, drawing, video and performance, Hopf playfully anthropomorphizes objects such as laptop computers or ceramic vases by adding facial features, hair, arms, or legs. Her work thereby often emphasizes the possible failures and misunderstandings that occur in both our daily communication and our conducts within built urban structures. Her most recent three-dimensional works are made of brick, taking on shapes that allude to certain physical experiences through a sort of visual paradox or oxymoron: a football, hand, or trolley case are rendered immobile, frozen in place by their weight and solidity. At the gallery booth, Judith Hopf will feature one of her recent brick sculptures entitled Birne (2018), which transforms abstract geometric forms – here an organic, round or pear shape – that reflect humorously on the needs of daily life and the prevailing acceleration of pressures within society.

KAYA is Kerstin Brätsch and Debo Eilers. Both artists consider their own practices – painting and sculpture – the subject matter and base material of a conceptual and multidisciplinary work. KAYA is interested in continual processes of displacement, variation and reproduction through appropriations of digital imaging. In collaboration with their muse Kaya, they elaborate on the possible creation of a third body and thereby with the potential extension of their sculptural and painterly investigations. Beyond being triggered by an interest in youth culture by involving another person and their own personal histories, KAYA is an approach that explores unknown territories, embraces the unpredictable, and diffuses classifications while challenging notions of authorship, originality, and exchange value. At Art Cologne 2019 they are represented with their recent work KAYA Pelle/ Teste di calcio (2018) which they first presented in the exhibition Kerstin Brätsch_Ruine / KAYA_KOVO at Fondazione Memmo in Rome last year. In this work sculpture and painting merge into a large hybrid being. Different skin textures, bodily shapes and coverings come together to create a semi-human entity, conjuring the specters of animism as well as of science fiction.

Gerry Bibby’s works move across performance, sculpture and writing, taking shape at the uncomfortable rifts between the three. Often his presentations become a multi-pronged ‘performance’ in space that transforms the physical site into a place of his own poetry, reflecting the role of the artist and his attitudes towards institutions and exhibition making. Thereby he steadily transforms the functionality of everyday objects, lending them new significances at the level of language. In his works queer contexts intersect with politics, especially with the attempt to question existing social orders, their hierarchies and their various inscriptions on the body. At this year’s Art Cologne, one of the recent works from his series of benches will be on display. In the series he combines a popular resting device from public space with texts that fluctuate between instructional or suggested performative actions, description and utterances of direct address.

Tobias Spichtig’s artistic practice extends from painting to sculptural works up to theatrical performances. The motifs of his large-format paintings – mostly vinyl prints and oil on unprimed canvas – are often reminiscent of popular cultural codes from the 1990s as well as of transformed icons from recent art history. His works thereby oppose a clear categorization of media and content, but rather employ the aesthetic strategies of the artist’s own network, which is deeply rooted in the contemporary art, music and fashion scene.
At this year’s Art Cologne, Tobias Spichtig will present a recent painting that plays with the word DOG and its possible hidden reading referring to a more spiritual sphere (GOD). As in his other works, Tobias Spichtig takes up reference to everyday life, to communication and to both public and intimate space, modifying them by exaggeration or oversizing, changing the way they can be perceived.