We are very pleased to present the first solo exhibition of the French photographer Jean-Louis Garnell (* 1954 in Brittany) in Hamburg. The artist demonstrates to us the dissolution of subject and motif, the dissolution of the genre itself. Using the means of photography and digital media, he attempts to locate the world, the present and man's relationship to space and time, to the material and the virtual. His artistic concept includes the use of classical pictorial genres such as landscape, portrait, interior and still life. At the same time, however, he also uses abstract forms, which he derives from a specially programmed software and develops for his visual language. In his works, the artist explores opposites: System and chaos, the natural and the artificial, reality and representation, the material and the physical.

Le bout de la table #26 1998-2011, 2019
Pigment Ink Jet Print on Baryta Paper on Dibond
40 x 60 cm

Courtesy: The artist and Drawing Room, Hamburg
Photo: Jean-Louis Garnell, Paris

For her first exhibition oto & kawa at the Drawing Room, Asana Fujikawa was inspired by a Japanese Shintō myth. Superstition and religion, fear and desire, heroism and monsters play a role in it - especially with regard to the influence of water or the sea on man. The artist draws from the long ceramic tradition of Japan, draws and etches and composes her own texts. In the process, all the components fit organically into one another without a fixed chronology. In this way, new cross-media narratives emerge that are not closed, but liquid and permeable. All the figures, be they heroes and heroines, monsters or containers of souls, come from a coherent cosmos and reappear again and again in her work.

Asana Fujikawa
Soul container in spring 2022
Ceramic, glazed
15 x 11 x 5 cm

Courtesy: The artist and Drawing Room, Hamburg
Photo: Asana Fujikawa, Hamburg

Exhibition text > PDF

In her work, the Berlin-based artist Johanna Jaeger (* 1985 in Heidelberg) makes time and light as the main constituents of the photographic process a conceptual and motivic theme. To this end, she has developed a characteristic pictorial language that revolves around fluid ephemera such as clouds, colour gradients, and the processual dissolution of form; all this ties in with phenomena of light and exposure and also addresses the sedimentation of the solid as a photographic metaphor. In her first solo exhibition clouds & pebbles at the Drawing Room, Johanna Jaeger constructs a framework with the two installation works, sky piece and river pebble (horizontal split_1-∞) (both 2021), thus literally proclaiming the exhibition a "picture space". From this, she unfolds a field of tension for her photographic tableaus as well.

Johanna Jaeger
Blue swirl / inverse fall, 2020
each pigment print
each 29,6 x 23,5 cm

Courtesy: The artist and Drawing Room, Hamburg
Photo: Johanna Jaeger, Berlin

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In his work, sound and media artist Claus Böhmler (1939 – 2017) analysed the media and the changes in reception and perception that accompanied its development. Our exhibition project, which was conceived in close cooperation with the Böhmler estate, concentrates on the “TYPOGRAMME – Schreibmaschine” (Typogram - Typewriter) series of works. In these critical and humorous drawings with text, produced in 1968 and reflecting everyday life, Böhmler uses a typewriter as a drawing instrument. His later artistic strategies and concepts can already be found in this early series of works. The exhibition and an accompanying catalogue (published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König) will examine the important aspect of how effective language is as a medium of visual communication in Böhmler’s work, and will bring initial insight into its significance to his interdisciplinary oeuvre to a wider audience for the first time.

Claus Böhmler
Kommunikation (Communication), 1968
Drawings with text: Handwritten and typed words
29.7 x 21 cm

Courtesy: Böhmler Estate and Drawing Room, Hamburg
Photo: Helge Mundt, Hamburg

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The concept “panta rhei” which goes back to Heraclitus, or Ovid’s “omnia mutantur, nihil interit” (Ovid, Metamorphoses: XV, 165) describe a significant aspect of Pablo Schlumberger’s exhibition in the Drawing Room. What is flowing, what has changed over the course of time, and what indeed remains as it is? These types of questions could occur to exhibition visitors when they view the seven hybrids of photography, digital drawing and sculpture in the current series of work “Total Aberration”, the painting on men’s shirts, and the three sculptural works. The pictures of a faintly recognizable Euro-Manikin sculpture were taken by the artist in the summer of 2017 on his ‘Grand Tour’, using a disposable underwater camera in Neapolitan fountains and in the Bay of Naples. The photographs, which in their blurriness call to mind the aesthetic of underwater expeditions by treasure-seeking divers, allow wide-ranging interpretations about the depicted subject’s exact location. Schlumberger invites us to take a visual dive into liquid worlds, which on closer observation open a second pictorial level and reveal his artistic thinking in the interstitial spaces.

Pablo Schlumberger
TOTAL ABERRATION 8, 2020
UV print with liquid gloss finish on Alu-Dibond
90 x 60 x 2 cm

Courtesy: The artist and Drawing Room, Hamburg
Photo: Helge Mundt, Hamburg

List of exhibits > PDF

In our exhibition project "Odyssey – an Exile Collage", the characteristics of Marseille as a place of temporary refuge and reservoir of the intellectual elite of Europe between 1933 and 1942 are expressed through a film by Maya Schweizer, a wall piece by Olaf Metzel, and a reference to the Heinrich Heine Memorial by Danish sculptor Louis Hasselriis from 1891.

Olaf Metzel's wall sculpture We Refugees, 2020 features a ground-breaking text by the Jewish-German philosopher Hannah Arendt. Maya Schweizer's film The Dying Soldier of Les Milles, 2014 focuses on the memorial Le Camp des Milles - a former internment camp and later a Vichy / German concentration camp of World War II in an old brickworks in Aix-en-Provence. At the same time, the camera looks at the monument of a wounded soldier dedicated to soldiers who died in the two World Wars and the Algerian War and at the game of pétanque played by the village community at his feet.

Both works deal with the disrupted fate of humans forced to flee from their native countries in multi-layered ways that merge the past and the present.

That way, "Odyssey– an Exile Collage" aims to raise the public’s awareness for patterns of discrimination and persecution from the past still relevant today. We hope that, by learning from the past, future generations will strive to show more solidarity towards human beings segregated as minorities.

The project is initiated by Drawing Room Hamburg, Raum für Kunst e.V. Hamburg and Produzentengalerie Hamburg

Supported by
Behörde für Kultur und Medien Hamburg
Herbert und Elsbeth Weichmann-Stiftung

Maya Schweizer
The Dying Soldier of Les Milles, 2014
HDV, 16/9, 13 min, colour, sound

Courtesy of the artist and Drawing Room, Hamburg
Photo: Maya Schweizer, Berlin

Short CV's of the artists > PDF

The exhibition series “The Body of Drawing” is dedicated to the broad territory of drawing and graphics. Thereby perspectives shall be considered going beyond the generally accepted and often biased approaches in which ‘line’ dominates. Not least, artistic positions distinguished by an interest in volumes and in the corporeal will also be examined. The direct traces produced by the physical action of drawing can allude to the body of the artist. The human body also comes into play as pictorial representation.
“The Touch of Density” – the first exhibition of this series at the Drawing Room – focuses upon a third aspect: the ‘body’ of the drawing, which consolidates as a physical presence on or out of the pictorial surface.

The exhibition series will continue in April in oqbo – Raum für Bild und Ton, in Berlin (www.oqbo.de). Further stops of the exhibition are planned for Zurich and Montpellier.

Nora Schattauer
untitled, 2017
salt solutions on chromatography paper
80 x 60 cm

Courtesy: The artist and Drawing Room, Hamburg
Nora Schattauer, Cologne

List of exhibits > PDF

The internationally renowned artist Jan Albers is a crossover artist who works with many different media to explore the limits of the art form of painting. His works swing between image and object – between abstract sculptured painting and painted sculpture. Albers employs naturalistic and industrial materials such as wood, ceramic, marble, steel, bronze, concrete and polystyrene. He arranges these ‘raw materials’ into strictly formal structures, geometric grids, and reliefs, but breaks these up through techniques such as sawing, etching, welding, chiselling or pressing, thus negating his own materials. Thereby he creates intriguing, powerful pictorial objects which strike a balance between order, chaos and emptiness. His a priori non-objective works always recall visual experiences from nature, however, or from the anthropogenically influenced environment. They evoke coral reefs and blazing flames or – seen from a bird’s-eye perspective – dystopian cityscapes, time-ravaged buildings of Modernism or violent modifications of the earth's surface. His wall pieces and reliefs testify to the beauty that lies in the destruction of an existing order.

Jan Albers
breAkingbAdbAd, 2018
Beton
40 x 30 x 20 cm

Courtesy: The artist and VAN HORN, Düsseldorf, Drawing Room, Hamburg
Photo: Jan Albers, Düsseldorf

List of exhibits > PDF