Circle Culture Gallery Berlin Welcomed Clemens Behr to exhibit in a two person exhibition titled “Surface to Surface” this month. We will cover Clemens portion of the exhibition. “Surface to Surface” seems to be Clemens most ambitious exhibition to date. I am not speaking about scale or installation wise as we know Clemens has been known to install some very large work insitu as well as in galleries. When I say ambitious I am speaking of the level of work that he has created for this exhibition. The sculptures and paintings in Surface to Surface have have become refined and polished to a degree that I haven’t seen from Clemens before. Clemens work has always been rough and made with construction materials, although this work is still made with these materials and the same aesthetic it seems Clemens has pushed further into the work. The new work moves in and out of sculpture, installation, and painting a trifecta that the artist manages perfectly to pull off. If you are in Germany we strongly suggest you take a trip to Hamburg to see the work in person you will not be disappointed.
GF
CLEMENS BEHR AND LENNART GRAU: SURFACE TO SURFACE
JUNE 7 UNTIL AUGUST 23, 2014, BERLIN
Circle Culture Gallery presents the duo exhibition “Surface to Surface“ by the young German artists Clemens Behr and Lennart Grau.
Considered from an aesthetic angle, a clash of diverging surfaces can be noticed – the soft and organic appearance on the one hand and the strictly geometric construction on the other hand. Whereas Lennart Grau’s artworks are characterized by smooth and round contours and atmospheric gradients, Clemens Behr works with strictly separated, architectural and edgy fragments to create his space-consuming installations.
In fact, the artists share the same pivotal idea: the relationship between surface and space. In their artistic practice, both have produced bodies of work that oscillate between the medium painting and its objectuality in different ways. Based on the assumption that space is defined by the relation between its surfaces and articulated through their adding and layering, by the use of elements like outlines, texture and haptic, the artists create completely new spaces. The play of three-dimensionality runs like a common thread through the exhibition – in the non-existent, imaginated space of a canvas piece or in the fragmented and reconstructed shape of a sculpture: a powerful area of tension emerges.
In the artworks of Lennart Grau, the exorbitant and pasty paint application almost sculpturally stands out against the surface of the canvas. On these hills, the artist creates lighting situations and searches for visual instincts while playing with forms of delusion and deceit in the tradition of the “Trompe-l’œil“ – terms that are transferable to deceptive buisness practices. The artist addresses the process of seduction when the rational mind underlies the lure of lust.
The works of Clemens Behr range between painting and sculpture. Installations – often with a pictorial approach – are fragmented by the insides and outsides of architecture. The surface is teared out of its original context and inserted into a new one. Different dimensions and perspectives get confused, blurred and interconnected. Behr’s partly walkable installations seemingly dissipate the seperation of space and object; they epitomize the process of deconstruction and construction. The symbolical destruction and fragmentation of the constructed space and its new, allegedly arbitrary design create “broken“ works that attain to perfection.
