Archive / 2008

The Flick Collection is delighted to present a large-scale, solo exhibition featuring the work of Wolfgang Tillmans, one of Germany’s premier fine-art photographers. Exhibited in the Hamburger Bahnhof, ‘Lighter; New Works’ offers the first comprehensive overview of Tillmans’ complex oeuvre seen in Berlin to date.

On view amongst other works are the legendary portraits, still lifes, urban views and landscapes through which Tillmans shaped the sensibility of the 1990s.  A photographer who immediately defies categorization, Tillman’s extensive body of work challenged the photographic medium to undergo renewed transformation.

Providing an additional focus to this exhibition, The Flick Collection is pleased to showcase a selection of Tillman’s abstract works, which continue to expand both the artist’s visual cosmos and vocabulary. The space-filling, atmospheric images of the "Freischwimmer" (Swimming to Freedom) series, along with the "Lighter" and "Paper Drop" studies, evoke a seemingly sculptural quality. Focusing entirely on the magical qualities of paper, these works, until now, have never been seen in Germany as an ensemble.

Encompassing more than 200 works from the period 1986 to 2008, the Flick Collection also showcases pivotal pieces such as the early photocopy works, (1988-1990) the "Turner Prize" Room (2000) and the elaborate table installation "Truth Study Center." (2005-2007) Unprecedented in its thoroughness, the exhibition presents a liberated, thoughtful retrospective of one of photography’s key figures in the twenty-first century.

In an era characterized by mass production and the seemingly-limitless distribution of photographic imagery, contemporary artists’ engagement with the camera raises numerable questions and opportunities for critique. What precisely are we seeing when contemplating these images? What relationship do they have to the reality they represent? Does the reality seen in photographs become perceptible only through them, or do they instead render strange a putatively familiar reality?

Alongside the retrospective of German artist Wolfgang Tillmans, the Flick Collection is pleased to present a thematically-driven, group exhibition of contemporary photography. Situated in the space of the Rieckhallen, the collective ensemble seeks to highlight selected positions in the artistic photography of today; re-asserting the increasingly important place the medium has held in the visual arts since 1970.

The exhibition features works by artists who have elaborated their views of the world photographically. Centrally significant are questions concerning the physiology and psychology of vision, and those related to the social, economic, historical, and cultural contexts referred to by these photographers. The Flick Collection’s democratic approach to compiling these works reveals the extraordinary, diverse opportunities present within photography’s visual language.

On display are works by, among others, Jeff Wall, Rodney Graham and Stan Douglas, by Bernd and Hilla Becher, Candida Höfer, Axel Hütte, Thomas Ruff and Thomas Struth, and by Peter Fischli & David Weiss and Beat Streuli.

The esteemed position of the artist as the ‘heroic soldier of individuality’ was critically examined and discussed by the Avant-garde in the early twentieth century. Such notions of autonomous creative genius consequentially became a theme which artists, working within these new theoretical parameters, exhaustively grappled with. Influenced to some extent by Barthes’ discourse, ‘The Death of the Author,’ (1967) the artists featured in the Flick Collection’s new exhibition have both interrogated and deconstructed a range of stereotypes associated with the (often masculinized) ideal of creative genius.

The Flick Collection’s group show, playfully ironic in its title, questions these conventional models of authorship, which have become critically scrutinized along with traditional notions of masculine and feminine creativity. The extensive works within the Collection are thus interpreted to highlight these self-reflexive engagements throughout a period of modern history; stemming from the witty male banter invested in Dada and Duchamp to the institutionally-critiquing work of Andrea Fraser in the 1990s. At times humorously, at times sarcastically, at times even destructively, the status of the artist within the art world has been the object of sustained reflection, and categories such as authenticity and subjectivity are duly interrogated.

On display from the Collection are works by Francis Alÿs, Art & Language, Azorro, Bernadette Corporation, George Brecht, Marcel Broodthaers, Marcel Duchamp, Maria Eichhorn, VALIE EXPORT, Peter Fischli & David Weiss, FLUXUS, Andrea Fraser, Dan Graham, Rodney Graham, Richard Jackson, Christian Jankowski, Martin Kippenberger, Sarah Lucas, Paul McCarthy, Bruce Nauman, Adrian Piper, Pipilotti Rist, Ugo Rondinone, Dieter Roth, Ed Ruscha, Antje Schiffers, Cindy Sherman, Sturtevant, Vibeke Tandberg, Lawrence Weiner.

Since the early 1970s, the Swiss artist Roman Signer has carried out performances involving everyday objects such as tables, barrels, balloons, bicycles, or kajaks. In carefully meditated and laid-out arrangements, these objects meet with the chosen elements of water, earth, air, and fire. Over the years, Signer has thus created a multifaceted oeuvre of "time sculptures," which take on a variety of different manifestations and forms.

The Flick Collection’s extensive presentation of Signer’s work includes numerous objects, drawings, photographs and films by the artist, including the documentation of Signer’ installing an artificial volcano at the landscape park of Wörlitz in the summer of 2007.

Parralel with this monographic exhibition on Signer, the exhibition currently on display in the Rieckhallen focuses on artists from the West Coast of America, including Paul McCarthy, Mike Kelley, Raymond Pettibon, and Jason Rhoades.