Minimal Shift
Group show with works by Benedikte Bjerre, Michael Bauch, Pierre Haubensak, Fred Sandback
3 February – 18 March 2023
We are delighted to welcome you to the group exhibition Minimal Shift. The show features work by one female artist and three male artists from different generations.
The show revolves around the installation A Home is not a House by Danish artist Benedikte Bjerre, which stands in the center of the exhibition's main hall. The work consists of ready-made tent poles and eight custom-made corners. It unfolds a provisional character, which is also reflected in the title. The Danish artist often works with slight adjustments to the environment and reality familiar to us. She already demonstrated this last year with works in her solo exhibition Who delivers, of which two works are currently on view in the showroom. By taking tent poles from their functional purpose and transforming them into house models, Benedikte Bjerre achieves a minimalist shift with the simplest of means.
By Pierre Haubensak we show in the same room two small format triptychs both from 1972: 3 Tones, 3 Times, One Way and Dark Light. In all six canvases, he moves the monochrome surface away from the edge of the picture and delimits the translucent color areas with a linear frame. With this gesture he thematizes the image carrier and poses questions about the function of the image. The idea of the picture as a window becomes tangible, only to become invalid again in the same moment.
The two triptychs are joined by a larger single painting from 1973, in which he followed the same principles. All these paintings were created in New York, Pierre Haubensak's place of residence from 1969 to 1977. The works by Benedikte Bjerre and Pierre Haubensak are complemented by an etching by Fred Sandback from 1975.
In the first room, visitors encounter three new works by Michael Bauch. With sparse means he placed silver circles and squiggles on differently designed painting grounds. A closer comparison of the three painting grounds is revealing and rewarding. In the painting with a light green ground, it is evident that Michael Bauch applied green paint to coarse jute in order to then record silver circle sequences on it. In the middle painting, he used silver paint to paint an area with circular recesses that emphasize the painting ground, a fine jute fabric. In the smallest painting of the group, Michael Bauch applied the silver paint to pre-dyed cotton fabric. His concern is to use an economy of means to turn the surface into a vision of something. In these paintings in particular and in his work in general, he makes a point of avoiding a clearly readable aesthetic. Important to him are the intermediate forms: The minimal shifts, also or especially of the painting backgrounds, which decisively change the perception of the pictures.