Gallery Hopping in Cologne: A Therapist's Feverdream, Axe Body Spray for Karl Marx & Live Love Laughing at the Middle Class
This month, I feel like there's even more going on in Cologne than usual. Here are three fun shows covering painting, video, and ready-mades.
impersonal figure: exc avate
The whole show is the screening of the 24-minute film exc avate by the anonymous collective impersonal figure. The title breaks down the verb to excavate, working with the idea of digging deeper and going beyond the surface.
A female voice narrates the story. Is it a story, though? There’s no real plot. Only cryptic sentences of something in between retelling a dream from last night and a full-blown manifesto. Memories and demands take turns. The mysterious phrases are pumped up with a rigid Christopher Nolan type techno beat.
Visually, we get a Nan Goldin-’60s-arthouse-filmnoir-psychothriller. There’s this woman who appears to be the protagonist. Sequences repeat, similar gestures and moments return over and over again. She wakes up in a white bed, draping herself in the covers. She navigates the Düsseldorf cityscape at night time (I will always recognize the shiny Gehry Buildings). The cut to a staircase reminds me of M. C. Escher (1898-1972, Dutch) drawings. She encounters a doppelgänger, and that’s when the video seems to follow a psychoanalysis track. The protagonist looks down into her reflection. Narcissus? A therapist somewhere is vigorously taking notes rn.
A lot of sharp shapes. She plays Tetris on her phone, walks around the shiny shattered mosaics at the Kunstpalast, and wears geometric costumes that remind me of those by Franz Erhard Walter (*1939, German). I like the contrast of black and white, edgy shapes, sharp rhythms, cryptic texts, and soft bed sheets. Only one scene is in color. The doppelgängers meet at a Chinese restaurant. Bright, grainy orange dominates. One thing is stuck in my head. The woman eating noodles on repeat. It reminds me of the recent AI videos of distorted celebrities chugging down several plates of spaghetti at once.
The film deals with trauma, deep-rooted pain, and intimacy. There is nothing between love and hate, the protagonist says at one point. The floor plan of a house is a recurring image. It appears as a sculpture, a 3D model, a costume. The house can be shelter, prison, protection, and isolation. It haunts the protagonist.
FLATS until March 30, 2024, Neuhöfferstrasse 12, 50679 Cologne
Fabian Ginsberg: Psychedelic Semiotics
It’s the third JUBG show I’ve been to so far and, ironically, this is the least psychedelic one. Fabian (Millenial, German) makes paintings that look abstract at first. Black holes on mostly blank canvases. As I’m pulled into the void, I notice nuances of color, shades of blue, black, and white. The paint takes on the shape of letters. Wait a second: Is that fucking AXE Body Spray?! Not exactly, but for the sake of the meme, it is. Fabian painted Nivea MEN bottles.
Next room. Two screens play the trailer Paranoia: Two people are seated in a room that first looked like a gym, but it’s an art studio. They might be the artist and his collaboration partner Julia Eichler (Millenial, German). They read a script from a teleprompter. One in English and the other in German. They quote passages on capitalist theory written by the artist himself and the German economist Paul Mattick (1904-1981). Mirrors all around. On the opposite screen, we see the speakers fully frontal as the camera woman circles them.
As far as I understood, the show is a take on Karl Marx’s phrase Religion is the opium of the people, commodities becoming the actual poison. Apart from the three watercolor iterations on Lenil products, it’s all Nivea MEN bottles. A product marketed for men is made to represent consumerism as a whole… Male experiences represent universal human experiences… Idk bout that, Fabian…
JUBG, until April 20, 2024, Albertusstrasse 13-17, 50667 Cologne
Guillaume Bijl: “Compositions” and “Sorry-works”
When I walked into the gallery, I first thought I missed the right door and ended up in some weird ass flea market. Or a very bad art show. I already wanted to do a full 180 like Dua Lipa but as I looked around, it dawned on me: It’s MEANT to look bad! With irony, the fun begins.
Guillaume (Baby Boomer, Belgian) arranges home decor he finds at flea markets, second-hand shops, and wherever live-laugh-love moms and man cave dads get their iconic kitsch accessories from: Dog sculptures guarding the front yard, cheeky statement doormats, wine o’clock wall art. I swear the seagull and world map combo is every Airbnb to ever exist. In the glass displays, he positions small decorative objects like fake wine glasses or figurines. These souvenir shop staples are details from Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights (1490-1500). One trinket is based on a famous Arcimboldo portrait.
Guillaume calls these his “Sorry-works”. But what’s the apology for? The atrocity of deco trash that gallery visitors are forced to accept as art? Or the pretentious standpoint of belittling the taste of ordinary people in the first place? It might be both. I noticed that Guillaume often arranges his works vertically as if there was a top-bottom hierarchy. When I asked him about it, he thought about it for a second before he looked at me with a straight face: “No, that’s coincidence only.”
The “Compositions” are less satirical. One Composition Trouvée (2012) or found composition consists of white plaster figurines mimicking Ancient Greek and Roman architecture. I first thought the bust on the glass plate was a European composer or some other historical figure of the 18th century. No, it’s just Elvis. Marilyn Monroe next to him didn’t surprise me after that. Neither did the smol Napoleon bust underneath. In another composition from 1992, Guillaume combined a female mannequin with black textile models. He put her in lingerie, handed her a BDSM whip, smacked some stickers on her skin, and hung a rug-convention sign over the whole thing. It’s very Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968, French).
Style is a question of class and status. If you have it, you have it… right? To me, it’s a great take on Pop. What is more Pop Art than turning kitsch into high art?
Galerie Nagel Draxler, until May 18, 2024, Elisenstrasse 4-6, 50667 Cologne
Next week, I’ll show you some more shows in Cologne. Stay tuned and subscribe!
Thank you for sticking around! As always, I appreciate you leaving likes, comments, or sharing with a friend (maybe skip your Pinterest aunt for this one…).
See you soon!!!
Jennifer
The Gen Z Art Critic