Carsten Becker
Show Gläsern
Gläsern
forms of uncontrolled control
Carsten Becker, Ina Bierstedt, Marcel Buehler, Roberto Uribe Castro, Sunah Choi, Monika Goetz, Tilman Hornig, Felix Kiessling, Isa Melsheimer, Christian Niccoli, Monira Al Qadiri, Shirin Sabahi, Kai Schiemenz, Julius Weiland, Nicole Wendel & Emma Cocker, Thilo Westermann, René Wirths.
Curated by Harald F. Theiss based on an idea by Ina Bierstedt and René Wirths.
Schloss Biesdorf, Alt-Biesdorf 55, 12683 Berlin
March 10 – April 13, 2025
Using photographic artistic means, Becker not only opens up a space of possible interpretations, but also scrutinises the demands and expectations of the depicting medium, as in the iconographically charged compositions of objects that are only familiar to us at first glance. After a first glance at the unusual and seemingly mysterious composition of functional everyday objects, mostly bottles, the question arises as to the interpretation and meaning of these sculpturally staged, unusually coloured glass objects. Carsten Becker's sober variations on still lifes are reduced to form and colour and develop a speculative narrative about materiality, affiliations and the artistic medium itself via the lacklustre surface: It is the representation of the sculpture that detaches itself from three-dimensionality. Sculptural images or pictorial sculptures emerge.
Becker's conceptual photographs are coolly staged combinations of DIN standards with RAL colours. The formerly standardised vessels are not necessarily reminiscent of the history of standardisation, industrial and product design, but refer to contemporary historical and socio-political contexts in the present. For Becker, shapes and colours are not universal and apolitical, but part of the visual, social and political (National Socialist) entanglements that later reappear as Vichy forms in everyday life and the collective.
Mit fotokünstlerischen Mitteln eröffnet Becker nicht nur einen Raum von Interpretationsvarianten, sondern hinterfragt zugleich den Anspruch und die Erwartungen an das abbildende Medium, so auch in den ikonographisch aufgeladenen Kompositionen der uns nur auf den ersten Blick vertrauten Objekte. Nach einem ersten Blick auf die ungewöhnliche und geheimnisvoll anmutende Zusammenstellung funktionaler Alltagsgegenstände, meist Flaschen, stellt sich die Frage nach der Deutung und Bedeutung dieser skulptural inszenierten, ungewöhnlich farbigen Glasobjekte. Carsten Beckers nüchterne Variationen von Stillleben sind auf Form und Farbe reduziert und entwickeln über die glanzlose Oberfläche ein spekulatives Narrativ auch über Materialität, Zugehörigkeiten und das künstlerische Medium selbst: Es ist die Darstellung der Skulptur, die sich aus der Dreidimensionalität löst. Es entstehen skulpturale Bilder oder bildhafte Skulpturen.
Beckers konzeptuelle Fotografien sind kühl inszenierte Kombinationen von DIN-Normen mit RAL- Farben. Die ehemals genormten Gefäße erinnern nicht unbedingt an die Geschichte der Normierung, des Industrie- und Produktdesigns, sondern verweisen in der Gegenwart auf zeitgeschichtliche und gesellschaftspolitische Zusammenhänge. Formen und Farben sind bei Becker nicht universell und unpolitisch, sondern Teil der visuellen, sozialen und politischen (nationalsozialistischen) Verstrickungen, die später als Vichy-Form im Alltag und Kollektiv wieder auftauchen.
About the exhibition
UNESCO declared manual glass production an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity at the end of 2023. The translucent material plays just as important a role in historical arts and crafts as it does in architecture: from the precious, mostly coloured glass windows of sacred buildings to the transparent architecture of modernism. In a figurative sense, however, ‘glass’ also serves as a metaphor for data protection, surveillance or the screening of state control mechanisms. In the group exhibition ‘G L Ä S E R N – forms of uncontrolled control’ at Schloss Biesdorf, artists approach this ambiguous term in photographs, paintings, installations, sculptures, objects as well as video and neon works.
Fragile and yet very hard, desirably beautiful and dangerously sharp-edged: glass combines aspects of craftsmanship and technology with its own aesthetic category – a material that transcends the material. Visionary transformations in architecture responded to the social upheavals of the Enlightenment and translated the once sacred connotations of glass into a belief in boundless openness and democracy – as in the spectacular Crystal Palace designed by Joseph Paxton for the First Great Exhibition in London's Hyde Park in 1851. The mostly translucent material exerts a fascination. Associations range from antique handicrafts and precious vessels to their contents, memories and historical, intellectual and spiritual traces. From a linguistic point of view, ‘glassy’ means: see-through, transparent, crystal-clear or even glass-like. In a figurative sense, it also describes the disclosure of – often socio-political – contexts.
The many facets of glass between medium and metaphor have always preoccupied artists of all genres. They use the amorphous substance as a material and at the same time try to capture the experience of an unreal transcendence. From the ‘Glass Man’ at the German Hygiene Museum in Dresden to the ‘Glass Flower’ in Berlin's Palast der Republik – creative development and technical feasibility are enabling more and more variations of the familiar functional and decorative diversity.
The exhibition ‘G L Ä S E R N – forms of uncontrolled control’ brings together works by artists who approach the subject in contemporary media: in painting, photography and film, in spatial drawings and illuminated lettering, installative or sculptural forms.The artists in the exhibition (de)construct, modify and manipulate and create uncontrolled imaginary spaces through contextual shifts and transformations of objects and motifs. Between aesthetic shaping and narrative design, they reflect on social backgrounds, resources and recycling or changing production conditions. The world has become transparent – reality has become a multifaceted kaleidoscope.
Texts: Harald F. Theiss, curator
Serial
DIN
Show
G L Ä S E R N – forms of uncontrolled control
Space
Schloss Biesdorf, Berlin
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