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BEAUTY SPOT
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beauty spot

Eve Sussman, Heiko Blankenstein, Fredrik Norén and Zhang Song


Opening: Friday, June 29, 2007   6:00pm
June 30 - August 4, 2007

beauty spot refers both to an alluringly placed mole and a scenic location in the landscape. At the heart of this group exhibition is the place where eroticism-expressed by a beauty mark on the skin-and the romantic allure of nature meet.

The video loop "The Kiss" by Eve Sussman and the Rufus Corporation shows two people converging in a slow-motion kiss. Their spontaneous moment of attraction, gradual movements toward one another and obliviousness to their environment is offset by a surprising turn of events at the end.

The works of Heiko Blankenstein convey a sense of heightened intensity in a different form. In his landscapes energy fields radiate clearly from objects and living creatures and flow into structured pathways. The lightbox "Junebox A IV S7" show a mountainous landscape with a recording studio at the center. A goat functions as a symbol of energy. The composition develops as the long-fingered, meandering lines take their course. The surfaces and structures created by the sum of lines create a rhythm alternating between densely packed and open spaces that come together as a fictive landscape.

Fredrik Norén presents his 2007 series "Ferrugo". Imitating a materiality that suggests rust eating through a surface, he paints landscape-like structures on 100 x 100 cm pressboard panels. The actual image always seems to be hiding just below the raised and broken surface. The work immanently conveys that the frozen process of change can be activated again at any moment.

In the three-part video "Seven Character Quatrain" by the young Chinese artist Zhang Song depicts a Chinese poem being read to an image of a classical Chinese landscape. A blind schoolgirl follows the raised structure on the pages of a book with her fingers. The text itself appears in projections positioned left and right of the central image. On the left the film takes the viewer through the landscape of a Chinese ink drawing, to the right through a real landscape. The artist does not provide a translation of the original poem. Viewers who do not speak Chinese find themselves trapped in a kind of "deafness." The poetry of the text can only be experienced on a visual level: a problem of understanding juxtaposed with blindness.

Eve Sussman and the Rufus Corporation, (1961) live and work in New York and Berlin
Heiko Blankenstein, (1970) lives and works in Berlin
Fredrik Norén, (1979) lives and works in Sweden
Zhang Song, (1985) lives and works in China

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