press release

Ivan Liovik Ebel | Every Now and Then

Galerie Gilla Lörcher is delighted to kick off the 2016 fall season with a solo exhibition by Swiss artist Ivan Liovik Ebel which is brimming with vibrant colour. In the scope of his “Loop” series, created over the past three years, Ebel has been exploring the idea of the artistic duplicate, investigating on the one hand the existential question (for works of art) of original and copy, while also probing the possibility of reproducing individual moments and creating simultaneity.

For the exhibition “Every Now and Then”, Ebel has developed this idea of the artistic duplicate further in another formal language. His recent sculptural work “Saaampling” can be seen in three separate instances in the exhibition. For Ebel, the process involved in its creation is also a reference to the world of music, specifically to the technique of sampling: that is, the act of taking something out of its original context, in this case a stone taken from nature, and repeating it in a new context. And as the thematic field of illusion is one of Ebel’s central concerns, the idea of the trompe-l’oeil (and its opposite) also plays a large role in this exhibition.

As Ivan Liovik Ebel himself puts it: “Individual works and series, created on the basis of repeated gestures and regulating principles, challenge the idea of original and copy, of temporality, transformation and chronology, as well as the idea of the relationships between time and space in the origination process of an image.”

For “Every Now and Then”, the gallery space glows in a soft pink. The Loop pieces, which seem to float in the room, can only truly be perceived as duplicate pieces when one takes the time to investigate them throughout the entire space. Visitors who think that they can capture the essence of the show in one glance or merely from a single perspective will indeed miss out on half of what the exhibition has to offer. “Every Now and Then” contains two exhibitions in one. A challenge for the Berlin Art Week flâneur.

Ivan Liovik Ebel (born in 1983) lives and works in Berlin. He received his Masters in Contemporary Arts Practice from the Bern University of the Arts. In 2015 Ivan Liovik Ebel was nominated for the Berlin Art Prize. His work has been exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions at Kunsthaus Langenthal (CH), Kunsthalle Bern (CH), Neue Galerie, London (GB) and Bern (CH), Marks Blond Project, Bern (CH), ZQM Projektraum, Berlin (DE), Lage Egal Projektraum, Berlin (DE), Galerie Widmer Theodoridis, Zürich (CH), Annka Kultys Gallery, London (GB), Galerie Gilla Lörcher I Contemporary Art, Berlin (DE), among many others.