More about "Really, I live in dark times", 2024

Kunstmuseum Moritzburg, Halle (Saale)

 "Really, we live in dark times!" - This is how Bertolt Brecht's poem "To those born after", written between 1934 and 1938 and published in exile in 1939, begins, which is as relevant today as it was almost 100 years ago. Against the backdrop of today's crisis-ridden times, the frequently proclaimed political turning point and the repeatedly assumed end of modernism, the exhibition poses the question of the significance of painting. To this end, it focuses on the work of Sandra del Pilar, who is becoming increasingly visible in the international art world, as autonomous aesthetics and socio-political positioning seem to be perceived less and less as irreconcilable opposites. On the contrary - the young generation is literally demanding a position and social commitment. The artist's work is an adequate contemporary example of this. 
 

The exhibition aims to draw attention to an interesting position of "post-autonomous" painting, which confidently and aesthetically precisely depicts and reflects the themes of our time. 

For more than 20 years, the German-Mexican conceptual artist and painter Sandra del Pilar has been working in the field of tension between material sensuality and discourse on content. She does not see form and content as opposites any more than she sees physical experience and logical thinking or aesthetic autonomy and socio-political positioning. According to her, each of these aspects only fully unfolds when - in the painted image - it merges with its complement to form a unity. Her themes often revolve around the various forms of power: the power of interpretation, the power of definition, the power of violence, the power of asymmetrical relationships, the power of the visibility regime, etc. This power is never "illustrated", "represented" or "depicted". Instead, it is always made physically tangible through the technical refinements of her highly complex figurative painting. And the image itself is always reflected upon as a medium and scene of the "aesthetic event" when she takes up current themes and combines them in multi-part picture series or broad-based, interdisciplinary projects.

The selection of works planned for the exhibition is intended to make a contribution to questioning and clarifying the concept of painting once again and to raise the question of whether what paintings have to say to us today really has to go as unheard as the call of the ancient seer Cassandra once did. 

The show is sponsored by the Kulturstiftung Sachsen-Anhalt e.V., Volksbank Halle (Saale) and VR Stiftung. It will be accompanied by a catalog that approaches the artist's oeuvre from different perspectives. It contains texts by 

Thomas Bauer-Friedrich, Sandra Del Pilar, Margo Glantz, Hans Körner, Hannes Körner, Thomas Kuhn, Lotte Laub, Alexander Leinemann, Diana Lenz-Weber, Rainer Metzger, Elizabeth Rosas, Marta Smolinska, Ursula Ströbele, Wolfgang Ullrich, Annette Werntze, Lukas Werntze, Manja Wilkens,Gerhard Wohlmann 

(Source: https://www.kunstmuseum-moritzburg.de) 

 

Curator:
Dr. Manja Wilkens