A Gallery & 3 Off-Spaces: What's Up in Cologne
On this week's menu, we have fragile lil egos, server farms, surreal theatrics, and a look at what people usually ignore.
Harry Hachmeister: Zitternde Herren
Entering the narrow gallery corridor, I am stopped by a stick. A stick growing out of a concrete base with a little ceramic thimble on top. Really making sure the sticks don’t freeze, huh? 🥹 The tree-and-ceramic-thimble pieces are part of Harry’s (Gen X, German) Fragile Egos series. These little plants look like they need a lot of care to blossom when in reality, they’ll be perfectly fine anyway.
Slightly behind it, a ceramic weight with a painted eye lurks out. It’s giving “My friend here wants me to tell you that he likes you.” Harry placed more gym weights between the tree branches. Some even have glitter. Working out is a recurring theme in his art. The gym remains a men-dominated sphere. One where ideals of masculinity are shaped and where weakness is nothing but a pre-glow-up state. I doubt that I could lift those ceramic weights just like that. At the same time, they look shapeless like leaking balloons. Some weights look like…balls. Others with their gooey smushy texture look like Haribo made a limited edition gym weight-shaped jelly collection. High protein and zero sugar? Or rather feel good vegan and no gelatine?
Paintings line the walls. Nude bodies in unexpected settings: In Schwuz (2024), a lower body wearing heels leans against a green pole like those at bus stops or in subway stations. The dick is right next to the FCK AFD sticker. A naked couple meets at the corner of a building. Only one of them wears shoes. Another guy walks into a forest with nothing but shoes on. What’s up with the shoes here?! Some paintings look like those “All dreams have a meaning” compilations that don’t make any logical sense. The giant owl carrying a human in In memory of a nonbinary child (2024) being one of them. Harry paints these scenes behind glass, meaning he’s not starting with the background and works into the foreground but the opposite. He first paints the outlines of a body, fills them, and then adds layer over layer receding into the background. Their slightly matte structure resembles ceramics again.
Although Harry works across a variety of media, his most common choices are painting and ceramics. I see a parallel to Ceramicpapi: A guy on TikTok with a thick beard and a sunshine smile who shows off his little pottery pets, giving them cute names in high-pitched voices and most importantly — cute booty cheeks. While Ceramicpapi is an example of a straight-presenting man embracing a gentle and joyful side, Harry ties in nuances of queerness in expectations of manhood. Both question masculinity in their own ways: Why would masculinity and cuteness contradict themselves?
fiebach, minninger, until April 05, 2025. Venloer Strasse 26, 50672 Cologne
Till Bödeker: Screensaver
Till (Millennial, German) works with digital technologies and AI. This time, he turned the exhibition space into a server farm. Looking through the glass front from the outside, it even feels as if looking through a computer screen into its inner machinery.
Three metal structures just like those used for actual servers secure three flatscreens in place. To the right: the exhibition text. But not written on paper. Till wrote the exhibition text with the help of AI, prompting it to make it more artspeaky here, a bit simpler there, elongating and shortening content before getting an introduction that’s a mix of pretentious and understandable. An AI voice reads the text out loud, the subtitles running over a Minecraft background on the screen. Lowkey I didn’t pay much attention to what Till was telling me at that moment cause the Minecraft visuals got me locked in.
The first of the three screens is a 3D animation of a server room with some AI footage peeking out in between. The camera slowly rolls up and down the dark hall, illuminated only by the glaring bright computer screens. After some minutes, the screen slowly fades dark before lighting up again and resuming its nightly surveillance check-up. Is it night, though? I guess a server room is like a casino — You never know what time it is. The fading in and out makes me think of fluttering eyelids. As if a security guard got tired on their shift. A robot dog suddenly runs through the screen.
The second screen is filled Matrix (1999) type beat greenish cryptic signs falling down an endless void. Usually, my alarm bells would go off in any other context referencing Matrix given its appropriation by the incel manosphere. Here, though, the visuals refer much rather to how intransparent and cryptic the workings of AI have become, Till told me: The more complex these systems become, the harder for humans to control them.
I’d read the three screens as the hardware, the software, and the result. The last screen is an AI-manipulated video of square waves (I accidently first wrote “waffle waves” and I’m highly disappointed that this isn’t what they’re called). Till surfs a lot and shared that square waves are extremely dangerous due to the conflicting water currents. The AI is pixelating the image, faking a natural phenomenon that looks like it can’t be real.
This brings me back to the title: Screensaver. The seascape is exactly the type of screensavers that many computers already have preinstalled. And isn’t ironic that you need unbelievable quantities of water to keep those servers cooled? Screensavers are literally called like that because they prevent visuals from burning into the screen due to long exposure time. It’s kinda like standing up and doing a nice stretch after sitting for too long. Weird how much these machines got in common with us…
Gemeinde Köln, until April 6, 2025. Ebertplatzpassage, Store 7, 50668 Cologne
Sissy Schneider & Blanca Barbat: Opening Cracks, enclosing hells
Sissy’s (Millennial, German) and Blanca’s (Millennial, Catalan) duo exhibition plays with theatrical and surreal elements. The exhibition space is tricky, though: The division into two rooms suggests two separate exhibitions rather than one intertwined show. Although Sissy’s paintings share fairytale motives, stylistically, they’re all very different. Some were neat, I think the paintings and chalk drawings go mostly in an interesting direction, I’m not so sure about the costume sculpture, though.
I liked Blanca’s work a lot: In the corner of her tight space, she installed a print on black translucent foils reminding me of X-rays. The depicted bodies are fragmented into several sheets. They’re twisted in shades of black, beige, and earthy tones, fluidly alternating between anatomically correct body parts, geometrical sculptures, and fully abstracted entities. They’re merging into one another and fight on some checkered landscape diffusing into full darkness. The multiplied head on the left reminds me of Sandra Vásquez de la Horra’s (Gen X, Chilean) style. One thing is for sure: Blanca’s drawing technique eats.
She also created a lightbox with drawings on both sides. Aesthetically, the side where smoke ascends from the melting bodies is more advanced than the other side, where the bodies are mostly naturalistic until the star-shaped limbs. The resolution of the printed images is also a bit too low for the size of the lightbox, but she’s got the spirit.
Down in the subway station, the tunnel’s glossy red tiles are contrasted with Sissy’s and Blanca’s black and white works in the glass displays. Sissy’s presentation is — frankly speaking — simply neat stage design. Blanca’s print on draped glossy plastic film is a serve: The messy composition is something in between William Bouguereau’s (1825-1905, French) Dante and Virgile (1850) and Pablo Picasshole’s (1881-1973, Spanish) Guernica (1937).
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ICA (Island of Contemporary Art Cologne), until April 6, 2025. Ebertplatz 23 + Subway Station Ebertplatz, Underground / South Exit, 50668 Cologne
Juliette Blightman: 360
Benjamin initially founded Josey in Norwich, UK, focusing on presenting UK-based artists. This is the second show in the new Cologne venue: A light-flooded storefront space with a beautifully plastered antique ceiling. Counterintuitively, it wasn’t a good idea to see the show during the day: The projected video turns into pale fluttering light.
The show sheds light on what’s usually out of sight or discarded. Juliette (Gen X, British) started filming exhibitions she went to back in 2007. This compilation here was made between 2015 and 2024. The projected video has nothing in common with those neat show documentations and polished installation shots that end up on the gallery websites and in newsletters. Juliette films the spaces casually, getting up close to a wall text or capturing people around, seemingly not caring about the art but everything else. The focus lies entirely on her subjective, personal POV.
Downstairs, Juliette presents a similar video from 2023. Four photographic prints hang on the wall. I can’t make out what exactly they are. There’s golden hues and blue-green dots. When Benjamin told me, it clicked: It’s photographs of laptop screens. It all made sense. The shimmer of smudgy fingerprints, the light reflection. Taking a picture, I see my reflection captured by the photograph, looking at a screen through my own screen. Every piece is untitled with a date in brackets. Each becomes an impression of one day, a diary entry. Who would have thought that gross greasy finger smears could look so pretty?
Josey, through March 23, 2025. Gladbacher Str. 25, 50672 Cologne
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Next week I want to see what’s up in Düsseldorf. Stay tuned! If you enjoyed this one, I hope you subscribe and leave a like.
See you soon!!!
Jennifer
The Gen Z Art Critic
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