Descripción de la Exposición
Galeria Casado Santapau is delighted to announce the opening on November 5th, 2020 of the exhibition Gerold Miller I Anselm Reyle I Katja Strunz. These Berlin artists represent outstanding positions within the field of geometric-abstract and minimalist-conceptual art-making, with each defining particular themes and accents. At the same time, they share a common approach: they deploy the formal and contentual parameters established by the geometric-abstract avant-gardes of the early 20th century, as well as the minimalism and conceptual art of the 1960s, which they recode and infuse with fresh energy. Gerold Miller I Anselm Reyle I Katja Strunz includes wall objects, sculptures, and conceptual works, some created especially for the exhibition. Their restriction for the most part to the non-colors, silver, black, and white results in a concentrated, focused visual appearance.
Anselm Reyle and Katja Strunz belong to a somewhat younger generation than Gerold Miller. All three artists come from southern Germany, where they also studied. And all three have lived in Berlin for more than 20 years, and have engaged in an intensive exchange of ideas with one another, as well as exhibiting together.
The reformulation and adaptation of the vocabulary of geometric abstraction and of minimalist-conceptual art opens up a broad sphere of action which extends all the way from the purely formal contention of abstraction to the material fetishism and sculptural conceptions of minimalism to the theoretical investigations of conceptual art, and finally to the contextual inquiries of neo-geo during the 1980s.
In this regard, Gerold Miller is among the most influential and radical representatives of his generation. He blurs the boundaries between minimalism and conceptual art, and embraces neo-geo, with its focus on site specificity, as a further point of reference. The idea of art as place and presence plays a major role in his work. For him, it is a question of the beholder’s perspective of herself, of how she situates herself within ambient space. Gerold Miller’s works are non-referential, nor are they intended to trigger associations. Nonetheless, with their firm anchoring in the here and now, they reflect the conditions of the present. In particular with the series set and his three-dimensional sculptures, he has found a way to join space and time, stasis and movement, beholder and object, in a static work of art.
Anselm Reyle is among the best-known artists of his generation internationally. His paintings and sculptures are characterized by the allure of their flawless surfaces, which seem to hold the viewer under a spell. His works are based on a subversive mixture of citations of geometric abstraction, minimalism, and pop art, and the appropriation of everyday objects, with these references being simultaneously meaningful and meaningless for the artist. Because art for Anselm Reyle emerges from the non-hierarchical juxtaposition of various interpretive possibilities, he understands these points of reference as well as options rather than as obligations. He therefore displaces the contentual claims for meaning so characteristic of the abstract avant-gardes onto the consummate surfaces of his paintings and sculptures, where artwork and beholder encounter one another with immediacy.
Katja Strunz was among the first to become preoccupied with the potential of constructivistic and constructivist art for her work, in the process influencing many artists of her own and the succeeding generation. Her oeuvre is characterized by an intensive philosophical involvement with themes such as positivity/negativity, spatial displacement, and time, and by the wear and tear that is inherent to them, which she deploys with the aid of ostensibly constructivist folds, reliefs, and collages. With great poetic force, her collages in particular generate a simultaneity of divergent spatial and temporal levels, as well as the superimposition within a single work of art of various perspectives and moments of experience. In this spirit, Katja Strunz introduces visible marks of production and traces of aging onto the surfaces of her works as materializations of temporal processes.
For the first time with this presentation by Casado Santapau, Gerold Miller, Anselm Reyle, and Katja Strunz are exhibiting together as a pure triangular constellation.
Friederike Nymphius
Exposición. 19 nov de 2024 - 02 mar de 2025 / Museo Nacional del Prado / Madrid, España
Formación. 23 nov de 2024 - 29 nov de 2024 / Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (MNCARS) / Madrid, España
