Die Galerie in der Peterstraße
Curating, Design, Production
Lisa Pappon and I opened a gallery in Peterstraße in 2016. The goal was simple: younger artists, classical media, weird energy. We kept it going into 2017. Sold some work. Made some shows we were proud of. Then we moved on.
Jonas formed his works within self-asserted systems. Most of the pieces were essentially drawings, using lines as markers of direction or movement. The central work featured black boards with silkscreened circles, each filled with colored chalk lines. They were mounted with magnets on a wooden frame, allowing the end user to determine the layout. I really responded to the modularity of the piece.
The circle reappeared in a wall sculpture, positioned to draw focus as you entered the gallery. A high-gloss black disc, its shape seemed hand-drawn: all shine, soft curves, hand-made energy.
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Dominique Bernadet, Katharina Langer, Karl Heinz Maukel
Von der Insel auf das Festland
Katharina Langer, Karl Heinz Maukel, and Dominique Bernadet came to us through Honigfabrik in Wilhelmsburg. We responded to the eclectic energy of their work. Dominique showed bronze pieces that questioned the formal history of the medium. Katharina pushed realist and romanticist painting into the twenty-first century (only later did I realise her work could basically be called neo-formalist).
Karl Heinz combined the language of constructivist sculpture with found objects, adding geometric abstractions layered with video projections. We lit the gallery in subdued spotlights, partly to create an intimate chamber-like atmosphere, but also because Karl Heinz needed darkness for the projections. The result worked.
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Chuang Yi-Jou
WEG/STRECKE
Yi-Jou works in stage design, but her roots in painting run deep. One could call her works neo-impressionist, but they were so much more than that. She would take images seen while traveling, transpose them onto the surfaces of 3D cubes, then paint the cubes on canvas. The humour of moving from 3D to 2D, with a wink and so much character, still makes me chuckle.
She also performed twice at the gallery during the Drunter & Drüber – Neustadt Festival: WEG/STRECKE and 2.5D Cube. In WEG/STRECKE, she danced over a paper runner, with movement sensors hidden under her costume. The sensors were wired to a small robot, which responded to her movement by drawing lines across the paper. Sick.
Performed by: Chuang Yi-Jou
Costume design: Isabel Wiethölter
In 2.5D Cube, she acted as the third dimension of a drawn cube spanning the gallery floor and two walls. Sick x 2(.5).
Performed by: Chuang Yi-Jou
Costume design: Kai-Chiang Lin
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Ivan Šuletić
Gebäude und Pflanzen
Ivan works at the intersection of classical landscape painting and contemporary visual language. He creates massive cityscapes and landscapes, often by repeating a single detail until the canvas is filled, across formats as large as 200 × 240 cm.
His smaller ink works follow a similar logic, producing pieces that feel almost inhuman (superhuman?) in their precision. Classical training meets glitch sensibility, with a nod to post-internet aesthetics. Viewers often assumed the works were digitally produced, but every line was made by hand.
When I grow up, I’ll treat myself to a Šuletić original.
Die Gallerie in der Peterstraße
Hamburg, 2016–2017
