Friday 21 February, Christian Lemmerz' new exhibition “Medea” opens in Hans Alf Gallery. The exhibition, which occupies both the main gallery and the project room, consists of a series of new paintings, seven bronze sculptures and a couple of large-scale drawings.
Christian Lemmerz seeks to operate in the periphery of artistic implication: A considerable grey area between indisputable homage to high culture and obscure reference to pop. As Lemmerz himself puts it, his ongoing goal - and in his view the finest thing an artist can produce - is the searching sketch. That strange place between the initial idea and the finished work, where there is still space for the viewer's own imagination and personal references. In fact, a motif doesn't have to be anything else than exactly this: an empty vessel for the eye and the brain to fill with meaning. You can then confuse perception by giving an otherwise open motif a very person- and culture-specific title - for example, you could choose to call a depiction of the Virgin Mary ‘Medea’ - but generally Lemmerz prefers to leave a certain amount of autonomy to the viewing eye.
‘Medea’ is not a thematic exhibition. Christian Lemmerz’ isn’t that interested in Medea's mythical persona or her epic tragedy as such. Instead, the title refers to Medea as an iconographic emblem in the visual arts, a recognizable and frequently used symbol that evokes myriad connotations and references without further explanation. But what if we are deceived by our own automatic reaction to a familiar motif? This is the doubt that plagues Lemmerz, when he considers, for example, Michelangelo's ‘Pietà’ - arguably the foremost symbol of mercy in Christian iconography. What if the sculpture did not actually depict the Virgin Mary with Jesus in her lap, but Medea with one of her sons, whom she has just killed? Is it really possible for the same figure to contain two such fundamentally different narratives?
The torso, which is also a recurring motif in both the exhibition and Lemmerz's entire oeuvre, contains the same inherent dichotomy, according to the artist himself. The original torsos, which the High Renaissance almost idolized in its worship of the aesthetics of Antiquity, were in fact defective works of art; fragments of whole bodies with arms, legs and faces that time or human carelessness - or both - had distorted and shattered to the point where only the core, the very essence remained. The torso was not a finished artwork. But with Rodin's paradigmatic sculptures in particular, the torso itself became a motif that was no longer to be understood as a fragment. When we stand in front of a torso today - as a sculpture, painting or drawing - few people think about the historical connotations of the figure. The torso has become a motif in its own right, detached from its cultural origin.
A painting or a drawing has the potential to do something a photography can’t: You can draw or paint a torso without it necessarily becoming morbid or grotesque, but you could never photographically reproduce a dismembered human body, without the obvious violence and extremity of the action that preceded it overshadowing the motif. The work of the hand in the visual arts creates a unique space of opportunity that each individual artist must utilize. Be it through the deceptive lightness of a line, the ambiguity of the subject, or even a title's ability to confuse. It's about looking, but never finding. The ultimate goal is the ever-searching sketch.
”Medea’ opens on Friday 21 February with a reception from 5pm to 8pm and will be on view through Saturday 22 March. Everyone is welcome.
