Archive / 2006

The Friedrich Christian Flick Collection is pleased to present its second one-man retrospective, dedicated to the American artist Richard Jackson. Since the 1960s, Jackson has concerned himself with a neo-Pollockian concept of performative painting.

A self-confessed art anarchist who grew up during the zeitgeist of Abstract Expressionism, Jackson works with paint and canvas, yet the result is not painting in its traditional sense, but rather an exponentially expanded field. Creating architectural spaces made up of canvases, or wall-filling paintings produced by using reversed, mechanically rotating canvases, this retrospective of Jackson’s work presents a unique glimpse into the artist’s unique aesthetic investigations.

With three of Jackson's large-scale key works from the 1980s, and a selection of his conceptual models and drawings, the Flick Collection’s presentation of Jackson’s work is the first in Berlin to offer a complete survey this Los Angeles-based artist.

Wherever we go, we are constantly surrounded by moving images. In a sphere of art, such images have increasingly developed a life of their own: existing "beyond the cinema," where the convention of viewing film in dark auditoriums is consistently undermined. Now, images project themselves freely onto walls, are set side by side in multiple projections, are arranged as walk-in installations and are conceived as stagings in specially-designed architectures.

‘Beyond Cinema,’ the latest thematic exhibition from the Friedrich Christian Flick Collection, focuses on major film and video installations of the 1990s and their historical precedents.  Amongst others, it features the ravishing projections of Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist, Bruce Nauman's existentialist image of the body, the psychologically-charged film spaces of Eija-Liisa Ahtila and the highly conceptual installations of Canadian artist Rodney Graham. These contemporary forages into the world of cinema exemplify both the artistic and theoretical debates which surrounded the development of the projected image during the 1960s. Groundbreaking works, such as the films of Marcel Broodthaers, Dan Graham and the experimental filmmaker Valie Export, can be viewed in dialogue with the more contemporary works from the Collection’s extensive archives.

With thematic sections such as "Phantasmagoria", "Body Double" and "Repertory Cinema", the Flick Collection’s latest exhibition outlines the significant movement of the projected image to a realm outside the traditional cinematic space. At the same time, it demonstrates how subject matter, techniques and conceptual notions have shaped this form of media art to the present day. Ultimately, ‘The Art of Projection’ is a school of perception, offering an extraordinary experience of filmic effects - such as light, shadow, motion, sound and reflection - to its contemporary audience.

Parallel to the exhibition, Kino Arsenal will screen films, and a scholarly symposium will be held.
 

Following the success of its inaugural survey, entitled "Friedrich Christian Flick Collection im Hamburger Bahnhof,” the Flick Collection is delighted to present a new, thematically-driven exhibition. ‘Fast Nichts – Minimal Artworks from the Friedrich Christian Flick Collection,’ is an exploratory survey of the history of the Minimalist Aesthetic, which emerged out of the art of the 1960s and beyond. Literally translated as ‘almost nothing,’ the exhibition seeks to highlight the reduction of form and silence of simplicity which gracefully manifests itself within works present in the Flick Collection; including the contributions of Sol LeWitt, Carl Andre, Richard Serra, Bruce Nauman, Robert Smithson, Robert Barry, On Kawara, Richard Artschwager, Absalon, De Rijke/De Rooij and Toba Khedoori amongst others.