Daniel Kannenberg Weiße Stadt

Herzliche Einladung zur Ausstellungseröffnung Samstag, 23.01.10, 17-22..h: "Weiße Stadt" Daniel Kannenberg

White City Notes on Daniel Kannenberg`s paintings

The interior paintings of Daniel Kannenberg depict spaces by their functionality; not wholly definable, seg- mented rooms but those which are endowed with structure through singular pieces of furniture, houseplants and carpets. Words are deposited into these painted rooms and so intertwine with them. Kannenberg‘s ap- proach for these works is to use fragments of photographs of hotel lobbies, billboards and illuminated letters which he comes across on his travels. His motives are not specifically investigatory, but rely more upon every day encounters as it becomes increasingly clear that in such a globally fragmented and networked world, disparate places often share the same essential foundations and structuring principals. He collages on his painted interiors using photographic material and partially paints over them. By manipulating the scale of the objects and spaces he creates a jarring juxtaposition of tensions caused by the seemingly unbounded depth of space. The decontextualised fragments and details develop their own authentic pictorial vocabulary in the new mirrored compositions.

Daniel Kannenberg’s works employ predominantly dark, muted tones which invoke a sinister atmosphere. The image space is thoroughly formulated and developed before the painting process begins. The harmoni- ous balancing and stability of the surface composition dictates the arrangement of the figurative elements, which are born from corrections, over-painting and complementary features.

Near photo-realistic pictorial expressions are used to show the contingency of one’s unstable reality gained through a visually imagined depiction. However, because the space is not completely transformed into a de- ceptive rendering and appears only fragmented, the divergence is latently manifest between the visible reality and the illusion of the picture as it maintains it’s oneiric character.

In a different series of paintings, Daniel Kannenberg presents the viewer with masks and ectoplasm, symbol- izing the presence of ghosts during a séance, whereby he alludes to various discourses with which one tries to counter modes of civilisation and beliefs in progress. His compositions refer to art movements from the early twentieth century during which artists turned to so-called primitive cultures, which came to represent the unknown „other“of the European civilisation. African masks became signs of the hidden European iden- tity. The Surrealists examined other cultures in the hope to destabilise the established thought patterns in Europe. The paintings of Kannenberg expose that the self and the foreign, the conscious and subconscious must be thought of as tightly interwoven, entangled and referentially pointing back towards each other.

Bernd Reiß Curator MMK ZOLLAMT MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main

Daniel Kannenberg
"Weiße Stadt"
Veranstalter: KWADRAT, Martin Kwade