Maki Na Kamura: B-DU DU Cat. CFA Contemporary Fine Arts Berlin

The title, with its meaning to be seen in its meaninglessness, exemplifies Maki Na Kumara’s understanding of, and relationship to, painting. The artist stands for a pictorial language of the maladjusted, the non-literary, when she, for instance, places gestural schemes adopted from the figures of Jean-François Millet’s “The Gleaners” (1857) into an abstract surface. The latest coup is Maki Na Kamura’s turn to the imagery of K-Pop. Thoroughly styled and homogeneous in appearance, the video performances of Korean boy groups, in their hypersynchronous formation dances performed with military drill, function like individual images illustrating an event, comparable to the battle panoramas of the Peking Opera, yet entirely devoid of meaning. At any other time, such observational excerpts and the imagery arising from them would have been termed symbolist, but today these are highly topical “real” poses and attitudes that present individualistic moods of the kind that can only be conveyed through the suggestive power of the individual image.

Nicole Hackert and Bruno Brunnet (the founder of the gallery in 1992) are a permanent part of the international gallery world with CFA situated now at Grolmanstraße in Berlin/Charlottenburg. Their work is an inherent part of the beginning of the artistic careers of Cecily Brown, Peter Doig, Sarah Lucas, Jonathan Meese, Raymond Pettibon, TAL R, Daniel Richter, Christian Rosa, Dana Schutz, Norbert Schwontkowski, Katja Strunz, Juergen Teller, or Marianne Vitale, just to name a few. Maki Na Kamura: born in Osaka, Japan, lives in Berlin. In her work the artist deals with traditions of painting and their effect in the present. She claims a certain irony for herself and insists on operating at a distance from the mainstream. In 2005, for example, she placed a large ad in a Berlin daily newspaper and set up an exhibition across the street in a storefront of the Grisebach auction house; her question: “Does Maki Na Kamura belong to the art world now?” Henning Strassburger, born in 1983, is a German artist who works with painting, video, objects, and installations. His work repeatedly reflects on the role of painting as a filter of the aesthetics of a mass culture. He completed his studies with Daniel Richter at the Berlin University of the Arts in 2005–2006, before studying with Albert Oehlen at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 2006–2009. In 2014 he was a visiting professor at the University of Nevada, and in 2015–2016 at the Kunstakademie Karlsruhe.