Nord+++Nord+++Nord++++Süd

Series – Guest at kunstraum t27

Corinna Altenhof | Volker Altenhof | Susanne Kallenbach | Tamer Serbay

Opening: Friday, May 17, 2013, 7:30 PM

The current exhibition of the Kunstverein Neukölln showcases works by four artists from the far north of the country. The genres represented include painting, works on canvas/paper with wax and pigment, and ceramic objects. The artworks often intertwine interdisciplinary ideas, leading to new structures, unfamiliar forms, and vibrant colors. It’s never just about the surface impression; each piece reveals a temporal dimension, telling a story often rooted in a memory or a strong emotion. The viewer is invited to explore this narrative.

Volker Altenhof’s works blend abstraction with figurative references and multifaceted philosophical content. Through decades of engagement, the artist has developed a unique visual language. For him, color is the defining element of his design. He achieves an intense effect through a relief-like application of the base layer using palette knives, brushes, or sponges. In elaborate processes, color is applied in layers and then sanded down. Altenhof repeats this process up to twenty times, resulting in a textured surface where hues are broken multiple times, creating a rich transparency.

Corinna Altenhof creates memorabilia in wax. Various layers are carefully applied, structured, and shaped. Often, a memory of something experienced or seen flows into her creative process. In this way, a fleeting moment is creatively and self-reflectively sketched and preserved. The transience of the moment is countered by a fixation in the material.

At the same time, memory is distanced from purely subjective experience through intense reflection, artistic abstraction, and color application. The images invite individual re-experiencing.

Those familiar with Tamer Serbay's work know that he uses figures sparingly. With his new series "Crossover," Tamer Serbay not only takes a significant leap through time but also ventures into the figurative and narrative. His engagement with the cultural heritage of "European old master painting," familiar to him from his long stay in Europe, provides him with an inexhaustible reservoir of figurative imagery, imbued with rich contexts of love and death, status and power, history and future. Through photographic image processing, Tamer Serbay manages to extract a modern significance from this European visual reservoir.

Susanne Kallenbach explores unconventional paths in ceramic art. She creates structural vessels and three-dimensional clay sculptures, where sculptural ideas merge with graphic and painterly concepts. The discernible ambivalence between artificiality and naturalness, the dynamic contrast of stillness and movement, and the resulting intertwining of contrasting object experiences are defining elements.

For Susanne Kallenbach, the clay object serves as the starting point for a complex artistic investigation of her material, reflecting in various ways the essential means of a vessel that lead to ceramic sculpture. Interested in sculptural questions, she operates with definitions, tectonics, and multi-perspectivity of the body, as well as with boundaries and axes of space, and atmospheric values, such as the interplay of light and shadow.

Curated by Volker Altenhof