was du brauchst

Kevin Kavanagh is pleased to present was du brauchst, an exhibition of work by five young German artists.

Klara Hobza, Notburga Karl, Thomas Trinkl, Stefanie Trojan and Ulrich Vogl spent an intensive year of art and art perception in New York, sponsored by a DAAD grant in 2003/2004. Now they find themselves again in this constellation going north, happy to meet each other again.

Klara Hobza placed over a hundred light bulbs in the clerestory of the Sculpture Center in Long Island City, NYC. By switching all lights on and off, she turned the clerestory into a Morse code apparatus. Her video, shown in this exhibition, documents her desperate attempt, over two days, to communicate with the neighbourhood and people in the passing trains and cars in Morse code.

Notburga Karl aims to “always pull the rug out from under the pictorial”. She is looking for the immaterial incarnated on surfaces. Karl searches for the iconographical meaning behind the materials she is dealing with, playing with their elegance and working their specific character. The quirky dance between the clunky, ethereal, heavy and the light, confront our senses beyond sight.

Thomas Trinkl deals with images and symbols of our time, updating the ideas and ideals of art through forms of the glorification of doubt. In this exhibition he remakes the rock, “lange Anna”, which resides on Helgoland, a German island in the North Sea.

Through performance, Stefanie Trojan questions human habits and social patterns, interacting with the observer directly. She employs tactics of confrontation and objectification in simple yet complicated situations. In her 2002 performance, clothes donation, Trojan stood naked in an empty exhibition space and asked viewers to give her something to wear. In this exhibition Trojan will present a documentation of the work Lächeln/ Smile. During the opening she will perform a piece created specifically for this exhibition.

Ulrich Vogl’s comment, “there is no god, but I still believe in him”, gets straight to the ambivalence expressed in his work. Through drawing Vogl explores the gap between science and myth. Using readily found materials as grounds, Vogl’s elaborate but delicate drawings contrast with the mundane. Two-dimensional drawings are set within a three-dimensional environment. In this tension the poetic of his works emerges.

was du brauchst
Klara Hobza, Notburga Karl, Thomas Trinkl, Stefanie Trojan, Ulrich Vogl