Axel Anklam & Jan Muche - SCOTT

Opening on Friday, September 12 at 7 PM. The artists will be present.

Performance: Klinke auf Chinch Solo Set

During the season opening of the Frankfurt galleries, we will be open on Saturday, September 13, and Sunday, September 14, from 11 AM to 6 PM.

Axel Anklam

Axel Anklam's sculptures captivate with their clarity and strength. Dynamic and smoothly flowing sections alternate, creating forms full of tension. The artist prefers to use transparent or opaque materials: stainless steel nets, epoxy, latex. Shimmering surfaces cover metallic frameworks. Changes in light and atmosphere lead to ever-new perceptions.

The foundation of many of the artist's sculptures lies in harmonious structures based on selected musical sequences. To translate these into the proportions of the supporting elements, Anklam uses a monochord, applying it according to Pythagorean harmony theory. Other series of works are inspired by landscape formations.

Axel Anklam was born in 1971. He trained as a metal artist, earned his master craftsman title, worked as a restorer at Sanssouci Palace, and attended the Centro Europeo di Venezia. In 1998, Anklam enrolled at HfKD Burg Giebichenstein Halle, where he began studying sculpture, completing his degree at UdK Berlin in 2004. In 2006, he received the Meisterschülerpreis from UdK. Anklam's first public sculptures were installed in 2004 in Berlin and Bangkok, followed by others in France, Japan, Spain, and several German cities.

In 2010, Anklam received the Ernst-Rietschel Art Prize for Sculpture and the Gerlinde Beck Prize for Sculpture. In the same year, he was appointed a visiting professor at the State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart. In 2013, he participated in the Biennale di Venezia and won two competitions for art in architecture from the Federal Ministry of Education and Research.

Jan Muche

The transformers hum. Jan Muche has a penchant for machines, early modern machinery, and factory installations.

Looking at the images, one might call it a "machine obsession." The machinery intrudes into the pictures without making it clear what it produces or for what purpose. It seems to operate with a kind of self-sufficient production, working for itself.

Automaton economy. Like the Greek automatos, a self-operating machine that acts with mysterious self-movement. Even Homer (the real one, not Pound's father) mentions this in the Iliad, Book 18 (the most technoid of all), regarding this doing something for itself: a wonder to the eye. For the Greeks, causation was secondary; self-movement was what mattered. With Jan Muche, this also extends to ordinary power poles. However, they are not entirely ordinary; they resemble roller coasters. So: electrifying the past; the concrete electric utopia (Lenin's electrification + Soviet power) sometimes works in color too, especially when one is not afraid to use annoying (shrill or overly dull) industrial colors. There are further layers, more levels, where artists like Eisenstein with his frames and montages, Lissitzky with his Lenin tribune, Gordon Matta-Clark with his spatial cuts through solid (house) matter, or someone like Frank Stella with his color modules for building block images or color walls come into play. There is a photo of Stella sitting high up in the skeleton of a skyscraper, amidst the steel framework. As a (modern) painter, one is always in something like that. Whether this connects with Burroughs' cut-up, Deleuze's response (he calls it pick-up instead), Godard's jump cuts, or even Chris Marker's science fiction image sequences in La Jetée or his vertigo invocations in Sans Soleil remains to be seen.

Klaus Theweleit, from: Ekstasen der Zeitenmischung. A montage of images by Jan Muche

An examination of the works from the past five years shows the methodological consistency with which Jan Muche works on a figurative painting that leaves behind the zeitgeist, as well as any naturalism, representationality, and extraneous narrative, to arrive at a strikingly constructivist understanding of image and reality.

Christian Malycha

Jan Muche was born in 1975 in Herford. He trained as a lithographer and studied painting from 2001 to 2006 with K. H. Hödicke at the University of the Arts in Berlin, ultimately as a master student. In 2008, he took on a teaching position at the Berlin-Weißensee School of Art. Jan Muche lives and works in Berlin.