Programme for the Year 2010

Juergen Teller
until 14 Feb. 2010
Today, Juergen Teller is one of the most sought-after fashion, commercial and portrait photographers world-wide. The exhibition in Kunsthalle Nürnberg takes a focused look back, showing a selection of his best-known photographs of Kurt Cobain, Kate Moss or Yves Saint Laurent, as well as examples from the long years of collaboration with fashion designer Marc Jacobs. However, the main emphasis is on Teller's extensive work groups from the last five years, also including three new photo series produced in 2009 and exhibited here for the first time in Germany: English actress Charlotte Rampling and Brazilian model Raquel Zimmermann posed in the Paris Louvre's department of antiquity for Paradis, entering into playful competition with Leonardo da Vinci‘s Mona Lisa. The series Der Schlüssel im Schloss (The Key in the Palace) was taken in the private chambers of Gloria Princess of Thurn and Taxis in St. Emmeram Palace in Regensburg; models Hannelore and Yuri and the princess' daughter Elisabeth are portrayed by Teller in her mother's clothes dating from the 1980s and in new fashion collections. Zimmermann is an extensive series of photographs featuring Raquel Zimmermann, taken in Teller's parents' house in Bubenreuth. They continue the photographer's creative investigation into his own origins: here, the family history is unfurled from a new perspective. The series Ed in Japan (2006) and Louis XV (2004) will also be shown in the Kunsthalle. Juergen Teller has developed a sensitive portrait of his young family in the photographs from Japan, while he and Charlotte Rampling staged erotic scenes at the Paris Hotel Crillon in the series Louis XV.
The exhibition in Kunsthalle Nürnberg demonstrates the great diversity of Juergen Teller's photographic work, which focuses on staging and self-staging, on authenticity and projection. Teller plays confidently with the clichés and "rules" of the fashion and advertising worlds and with the viewer's expectations.

Corinne Wasmuht. SUPRACITY.
11th March to 16th May 2010
Opening: Wednesday, 10th March 2010
The panel pictures by Corinne Wasmuht, painted on wood using a time-consuming technique of glazing – a meticulous process of image creation reminiscent of the old masters –, are developed in stark contrast to the omnipresent rush of mass-media images. Her works are so complex and convoluted, in terms of both their content and technique, that she only produces a few painted panels each year. However, this slowed-down painting process often represents a counter pole to the selected pictorial motifs. Particularly in the works from recent years that form the focus of this exhibition, Corinne Wasmuht frequently depicts urban settings like airport lounges or busy streets, which are characterised especially by their fast pace and transitory nature. As if in a hall of mirrors with its labyrinthine chambers, endless projections and strange distortions, the paintings are provided with a superfluity of visual information. In her works, Corinne Wasmuht always reflects the rapidity of our viewing and perceptual habits in the contemporary world. Earlier paintings frequently showed natural elements; the bodies or hairs of animals together with their ornamental detail structures. Here too, much appears to have been "sampled". In music, sound or music recordings are combined to create a new musical context in sampling. In Corinne Wasmuht's paintings there are entire archives of motifs, which she embeds in a new sphere of multiple perspectives. But these motifs never seem like foreign bodies, and it is very difficult to decide which parts of the huge pictorial collages are real and which are staged, what is natural and what is mere digital semblance. The microscopic detail studies unite into a huge, multi-perspective whole.

Karla Black
24th June to 22nd August 2010
Opening: Wednesday, 23rd June 2010
Unusual substances like powdered plaster, make-up, Vaseline, coloured pigments and nail varnish are the components used in Karla Black's sculptures and installations. In her exhibition at Kunsthalle Nürnberg, the Scottish artist also fills the rooms with these raw materials, which generally have feminine connotations in Europe. The fragile installations and sculptures develop energy from their unusual materials, which also contain a touch of chaos and the processual: a breath of air can change the appearance of the fragile installation and a drop of water may damage its surface structure. The works are usually ephemeral, therefore, and their transience is always present as a subliminal motif. This strategy means that works by Karla Black, who lives in Nuremberg's partner city Glasgow, are generally a reaction to the current exhibition space: her installations are context-related and they are not produced until she herself is on the spot. The complex ensembles comprising pieces of cellophane that hang from the ceiling, powder strewn into miniature deserts, or paper that adopts amorphous container-like forms represent a reaction to the relevant architectonic and social space. The reduced formal language here is always combined with a conceptual starting point, for the apparent harmlessness of the objects is extended by references to a meaning that slumbers below the surface. The minimalist strategies represent a point of reference for Karla Black, like Arte Povera and Land Art, trash and glamour, feminism and psychology.

Mathilde ter Heijne
16th September to 14th November 2010
Opening: Wednesday, 15th September 2010
Doppelgänger are individuals with a confusing resemblance to other people. For this reason, they are often employed by stars and politicians for security reasons or to optimise their time. However, this is quite different in the work of Dutch artist Mathilde ter Heijne, as she creates the doubles herself. Using plaster casts of her face and hands, she produces life-sized dummies that are very similar to the artist herself. In her installations, sculptures, and audio and video works, Mathilde ter Heijne succeeds in creating a multifaceted role play by reproducing her own identity in this way: social conflicts can be handled by her self-made representatives, who experience great emotions such as guilt and despair, fanaticism and self-abandonment, egoism and ideological blindness. Via her doppelgänger, Mathilde ter Heijne finds a new visual form for such differing themes as research into the matriarchy (The House of the Qiao Zi Family), trauma therapy (The Invisible Hero) and suicide bombing attacks (Suicide Bomb).

Mircea Cantor
9th December 2010 to 6th February 2011 Opening: Wednesday, 8th December 2010
To conclude the exhibition year 2010, the young Rumanian artist Mircea Cantor has been invited to present his installations, photographs, objects and video films in the Kunsthalle. Cantor captures social, economic and political themes in his poetic and sometimes ironic pictorial language. Many of his works attempt to find symbols with which to express life and its conditions: for example, Mircea Cantor locks a wolf and a deer into a gallery space in his video work Deeparture (2005). It is a work reminding one of Josef Beuys' performance I like America and America likes Me (1974), in which Beuys locked himself into the New York gallery René Block for a week, together with a coyote. In Deeparture the wolf and the deer wait passively, yet all their senses are continually fixated on one another. Cantor finds a striking metaphor for coexistence in a state of latent threat with this image of tense cohabitation. Inevitably, the situation of danger also leads to control and surveillance and thus highlights the thematic focus of this young Rumanian's art. For a state of (actual or potential) threat develops into a political and social belief in security, which – according to Cantor – has become our new dominant religion. Cantor finds poetic images in his work for this complex of themes – security, control, surveillance, protest –, taking a critical look at currently existing political power structures and the illusions of a neo-liberal society.