Ralf Ziervogel: As If Kat. Deichtorhallen Hamburg / Sammlung Falckenberg

Sensational subjects are spread across Ralf Ziervogel’s (*1975) sheets of paper spanning up to ten meters in length: without preliminary sketches, ink drawings depict palm-sized figures in extreme physical situations. They are bound, entangled, and knotted. These are delicate, complex drawings that show predominantly human bodies forming monochrome, ornamental webs. In Ziervogel’s works, bodies become split beings that reflect all conceivable metamorphoses of human existence while also encountering its limits. Ziervogel has been working on a series of body prints since 2014: composed of fragmentary impressions in black gouache, the result is a new dynamic body on sheets of paper up to five meters long. Every movement, every impression and smear on the paper is accompanied by handwritten texts composed by the artist, which stretch across the black impressions like a spider’s web, forming a second level of the works. The new works seem more abstract and reduced to a minimalist formal language that simultaneously suggests movement and calm. The consistency of the subject matter results in three-dimensional works that are developed over the course of years or even decades. They are Ziervogel’s utopias, crafted as sculptures or installations. Enormous buildings and small test facilities demonstrate how an idea can be implemented with all the means available today. Key works in this regard are also the videos from between 2001 and 2004, which can be understood as short, effective descriptions of emotions and a system of reference. Ralf Ziervogel’s works have been shown at the art and architecture exhibitions of the Venice Biennale as well as the Kunsthalle Wien, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Fort Worth, Texas, the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, the Deste Foundation in Athens, La Maison Rouge in Paris, and the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, among other venues.

Exhibition:
Deichtorhallen Hamburg / Sammlung Falckenberg Hamburg-Harburg, 29/9/2018–27/1/2019
 

Ralf Ziervogel, born 1975, lives in Berlin, and studied at the University of Fine Arts in Berlin in Lothar Baumgarten’s class. A grant took him to New York, where, in the beginning of the 2000s, he was a high flyer. MoMA NY bought some of his oversized drawings of explicit topics with which he had solo shows, among others, at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the DESTE Foundation in Athens, the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich. Ralf Ziervogel’s grotesquely overdrawn works, whose dynamism and speed are reminiscent of Kandindsky’s abstract compositions, reveal a pathological and, above all, brutal world full of senselessness.

The editor Dirk Luckow, born 1958, has been the General Director of the Deichtorhallen Hamburg since 2009. He graduated 1996 with a dissertation on Joseph Beuys and the American Anti-Form-Art. Luckow has since worked at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, and the Württembergische Kunstverein in Stuttgart. He also worked as project manager for visual arts at the Siemens Arts Program in Munich, before he became Director of the Kunsthalle zu Kiel from 2002 to 2009. From 2007 to 2009 he was a member of the Artistic Advisory Board of the Temporäre Kunsthalle in Berlin. In 2016, Luckow received an honorary professorship at Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg.

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