NO TALKING FOR SEVEN DAYS | behncke gallery

In the twentieth century, the idea of landscape has become more tense. We know that we can no longer ignore the reality of climate change, - the earth, and our relation to it, seems to be ever changing before our eyes.

Under the title „No talking for seven days“ (Hamish Fulton) the exhibition revolves around the question, how contemporary painting, how contemporary art is up to the challenge those changes are imposing on us?

What is our relationship with nature today? How are nature and culture intertwined? Strange paradox there are contemporary works pervaded by a melancholically Romantic yearning for a lost sense of "Romantic yearning". Is there still something that can be called „realism“ that guarantees a resemblance to s.th. depicted?

Luisa Baldhuber presents three phases of her work in her current exhibition. Following on from her light installation ‘Afterglow’ at the Haus der Kunst (until May 2025), she stages “Solstice” in the gallery chamber, drawing further inspiration from the ‘Light and Space Movement’ of the 1960s. Clarity, rational design language and minimalism combined with irrational aspects of psychoanalysis are evident in Luisa Baldhuber's following series of works, which are titled after real geographical coordinates (‘Glass Boxes’). Her surreal, sometimes weightless imagery arises from a tension between digital image design, smartphone photography and internet aesthetics. Dichroic glass plays a central role here, its polychromatic, reflective surface changing colour depending on the incidence of light. Baldhuber's current series ‘Archaeology’ shows a departure from the ‘Light and Space Movement’ and finds a formal language from sculptural fragments of a hybrid landscape. Fragmented, architecturally suggestive landscapes unfold, eluding spatial localisation and instead opening up imaginary expanses.

Art historian and curator Robert Fleck on Robert Elfgen
From this emerge paintings with contemplative effects and inscrutable moods, partially achieved by rubbing back the paint. "That's how the light comes," Elfgen says. This modulated paring-back is *gestural painting in the vein of abstract expressionism, but leaves no recognizable marks, no brushstrokes. As in Pierre Soulages's work, though brought about differently, light emerges from painting itself, from the interior of the image medium; to the viewer's eye, it seems to hover just in front of the image. This is accompanied by an indefinable, rarely seen brightness, but also by a natural unreality in its appearance and a visual scheme possessed of something sacred, with an almost atemporal presence in our present.
From "Good Things Arise from Contrasts" on the current exhibition Robert Elfgen "der die das", Fuhrwerkswaage Köln\