Peter Wächtler - Franky’s Theme

Bergen Kunsthall opens its 2019 programme with a new exhibition by German artist Peter Wächtler. The exhibition presents a large body of new works, in conjunction with a recent large-scale video installation.

Peter Wächtler works in a variety of media: bronze, ceramics, drawings and video. But in many ways "stories" could be described as his main artistic material. His works often evoke a narration, with animals or human figures in animated states. They are made in ways that use and adapt elements of fiction and folklore, relating to specific traditions and common tales, and materialize the ways of telling a story as much as the story itself.

For his exhibition at Bergen Kunsthall, Wächtler will assemble a series of four distinct spaces, each presenting a group of new works (ceramics, bronze, drawings) leading towards the Kunsthall’s main space in which the video Untitled (Clouds) (2018) will be projected. The piece features a lonely dragon with a straw hat gazing across a dried wasteland in front of colourful cloud formations. The silent images are overwritten by mid-screen subtitles, which report on considerations and reflections, using a language switching in-between associative poetry and an incoherent code with its true understanding long gone. We follow complaints, insecurities, hubris and self-questioning, while the creature, like many of Wächtler’s protagonists, keeps going. Sticking with the structural set-up of the Kunsthall and it seccesion of different sized galleries, the show's spectrum is broken up and bumpy, patching itself up from room to room. The four galleries, changing in modes and moods of production, display a stuttering and ambivalent relationship with progression, regression and the end.

During the exhibition, a new artist book by Peter Wächtler will be published with a collection of works comprising drawings and text contributions by among others John Kelsey and the artist, designed by Boy Vereecken.

Peter Wächtler lives and works in Brussels and Berlin. His work has been shown in solo exhibitions at Schinkel Pavilion, Berlin, M HKA – Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerp (both 2017), The Renaissance Society, Chicago, Chisenhale, London, KIOSK, Ghent (all 2016) and Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster (2014). Selected group exhibitions includeThe Absent Museum, WIELS, Brussels (2017), 6th Moscow Biennial, Moscow, Surround Audience, New Museum Triennial, New York (both 2015), A Needle Walks into a Haystack, Liverpool Biennial, Europe, Europe, Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo (both 2014), and Meanwhile... Suddenly and Then, Lyon Biennale (2013). A collection of Wächtler’s texts titled Come Onwas published by Sternberg Press in 2013.