DE: Ausstellung GRÜNE SOẞE
Als Grüne Soße werden in der klassischen Küche verschiedene kalte Soßen bezeichnet, die eine grüne Farbe haben, weil sie aus einer Mischung verschiedener Kräuter bestehen. Um eine richtige Grüne Soße zu machen – ganz gleich, welcher kulinarischen Tradition man folgt – braucht man mehrere verschiedene grüne Elemente. Die Luisa Catucci Galerie hat hierzu eine Ausstellung entwickelt, die sich visuell mit dieser Farbe auseinander setzt.
Um eine Ausstellung zu kreieren, die diesen Namen verdient, haben wir uns entschlossen, die sehr produktive Kunstszene Berlins anzuzapfen, um eine ganz unterschiedliche und herausragende Auswahl von Künstler:Innen zu kombinieren, die Kunstwerke präsentieren, die mit der Farbe Grün verbunden sind, um eine Ausstellung/Hommage an diese an Bedeutungen, Geschichte und Werten so reiche Farbe zu schaffen.
Künstler:Innen und die Farbe Grün
Innerhalb des XIX. Jahrhunderts – als eine der angenehmsten Farben, die in der Lage ist, eine Atmosphäre der Heiterkeit und Gelassenheit zu schaffen – wurde Grün in der Architektur in großem Umfang verwendet und mit vielen der verschiedenen Ausdrucksformen des Jugendstils – von der Kunst bis zum Design – verbunden, während Künstler wie Edgar Degas, Viktor Oliva, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, Vincent Van Gogh und andere den Absinth – den bitteren grünen Schnaps – und seine Fée Verte zu ihrer Muse machten. Das “goldene Zeitalter” des Grünen hat begonnen.
Aber es war nicht immer ein einfaches Leben, für unsere Farbe!
Wie kein anderes Pigment in der Geschichte der Kunst galt Grün als das giftigste. Es wurde für den Tod von Napoleon Bonaparte verantwortlich gemacht und später beschuldigt, der Grund für Paul Cezannes Diabetes und Claude Monets Erblindung zu sein – neben anderen ruchlosen Anschuldigungen -, die Farbe Grün erlangte einen so schlechten Ruf, dass sie Gefahr lief, geächtet zu werden, und das war sie auch eine Zeit lang.
Die industrielle Gewinnung der Farbe Grün
Vor dem XVI. Jahrhundert wurden grüne Farbstoffe aus Farn, Wegerich und Bocksdornbeeren hergestellt, aber die Farbe verblasste schnell. Synthetische grüne Pigmente und Farbstoffe wurden erst im XVIII. Jahrhundert erfunden: Schweinfurter Grün – ein hochgiftiges Kupferarsenitacetat – war eines der beliebtesten, und sein Nachfolger, das Pariser Grün – ebenso giftig wie sein Vorgänger – war das beliebteste Grün der impressionistischen Bewegung.
Es dauerte eine Weile, bis man verstand, dass die chemische Zusammensetzung der Farbe die wahre Ursache für die Giftigkeit war, denn das erste ungiftige synthetische Grün, das Viridian, wurde erst 1859 patentiert, gerade rechtzeitig, um Vincent van Gogh zu erlauben, es zusammen mit Preußischblau zu verwenden, um den hypnotisierenden Himmel seines berüchtigten Café Terrasse bei Nacht zu schaffen.
Der Kult um die Farbe Grün
Dieser erdige Farbton wird gemeinhin mit den verschiedenen alten Kulten der Mutter Erde in Verbindung gebracht – Gaia, Ishtar, Inanna, Freya, Ostara -, die ihre größten Feste im Frühling feierten, wenn die Natur wieder geboren zu sein scheint und frisches, leuchtendes Grün das Land wieder bedeckt. Dies könnte erklären, warum Grün in der europäischen Tradition als Symbol für Wiedergeburt, Erneuerung, Unsterblichkeit und Hoffnung gilt.
So wie im alten Ägypten, wo Grün mit der jährlichen Überschwemmung des Nils, die für die Vegetation und die Landwirtschaft von grundlegender Bedeutung ist, und mit dem Kult des Osiris, des Gottes der Unterwelt und der Wiedergeburt, in Verbindung gebracht wurde.
Grün in der Antike
Im antiken Griechenland hingegen wurden Grün und Blau manchmal als dieselbe Farbe angesehen, und das gleiche Wort bezeichnete manchmal die Farbe des Meeres und die Farbe der Bäume. Aristoteles vertrat die Auffassung, dass Grün in der Mitte zwischen Schwarz, dem Symbol für die Erde, und Weiß, dem Symbol für Wasser, liegt.
Auch die Römer schätzten die Farbe Grün – sie assoziierten sie mit dem Kult der Venus, der Beschützerin der Gärten, des Gemüses und der Weinberge – und stellten ein feines grünes Erdpigment her, das in der Wandmalerei weit verbreitet war.
Stilisierung und Verbote
Im Mittelalter und in der Renaissance zeigte die Farbe der Kleidung den sozialen Rang und den Beruf einer Person an: Rot nur für den Adel, Braun und Grau für Bauern, während Grün für Kaufleute, Bankiers, Adelige und ihre Familien galt. Die Mona Lisa trägt auf ihrem Porträt Grün, ebenso wie die Braut auf dem Porträt der Arnolfini von Jan van Eyck.
Im XVIII. und XIX. Jahrhundert wurde Grün mit der romantischen Bewegung in Literatur und Kunst in Verbindung gebracht und als romantischer Gegenpol und Antagonist zum grauen und schwarzen Rauch gesehen, der sich mit der industriellen Revolution ausbreitete, und folglich wurde Grün von politischen und ökologischen Bewegungen verwendet. Die Instrumentalisierung dieser Zuneigung hat dazu geführt, dass Grün in der modernen Gesellschaft eine wichtige Rolle spielt, politisch, ideologisch und marketingtechnisch.
Hoffnung, Regeneration und Glücksbringer
Für diese Ausstellung oder Hommage wollten wir den beteiligten Künstlerinnen und Künstlern keine bestimmte Interpretation der Farbe Grün aufzwingen, und dennoch, indem wir ihre Qualitäten als Hoffnungsträger, Regenerator, Wohlstands und Glücksbringer aufgreifen, wollen wir aus dieser Schau auch ein Ritual machen, um allen – vor allem aber der Kunstwelt – einen frischen, energiegeladenen, erneuernden Frühling zu wünschen, der die Stimmung der vergangenen Jahre verändert, als die Zeit der Wiedergeburt zuerst von Covid und danach vom Krieg mit der Energiekrise geprägt war. Wir glauben, dass wir alle genug haben, also leuchte, grün, leuchte! Und bringt uns das Positive.
EN: GRÜNE SOßE
A Grüne Sauce is the name given to various cold sauces in classical cuisine with a green color, due to a mixture of different herbs in their composition. To make a proper Grüne Sauce (green sauce) – no matter which culinary tradition you are following – you need several distinct green elements. To this end, Luisa Catucci Gallery has developed an exhibition that visually explores this color.
Consequentially, to create an exhibition worth carrying such a name, we decided to tap into the very prolific art scene of Berlin, in order to combine a quite varied and outstanding selection of artists presenting art pieces bonded with the color green, in order to create an exhibition or homage to this hue so rich of meanings, history, and values.
Artists and the Color Green
Within the XIX Century – being considered one of the most pleasing colors able to create an atmosphere of serenity and calmness – green started to be largely used in architecture, linked in many of the different expressions of the Art Nouveau movement – from art to design – while artists such as Edgar Degas, Viktor Oliva, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, Vincent Van Gogh, among others, elevated Absinthe – the bitter green spirit – and its Fée Verte as their muse. The “golden age” of green has started. But it wasn’t always an easy life, for our color!
As no other pigment in the history of art, green was considered the most poisonous. Held responsible for the death of Napoleon Bonaparte, and later accused of being the reason for Paul Cezanne’s diabetes, and Claude Monet’s blindness – among other nefarious accusations – the color green gained overall such a wicked reputation, that it risked being outcasted, and it even was for a period of time.
The industrial extraction of the color green
What happened is that before the XVI Century, green dyes were made out of fern, plantain, and buckthorn berries, but the color would rapidly fade. Synthetic green pigments and dyes were invented only in the XVIII Century: Scheel’s Green – a cupric hydrogen arsenide, highly toxic – was one of the most in vogue, and its successor, the Paris Green – as toxic as its forefather – was the most beloved green within the impressionism movement.
It took a while to understand that the chemical composition of the color was the true responsible for the wickedness, as the first non-toxic synthetic green, the Viridian, was patented only in 1859, right in time to allow Vincent van Gogh to use it together with Prussian blue, to create the mesmerizing sky with of his notorious Café Terrace at Night.
The Green Cult
Most prominently found in nature, the color green embodies rich foliage, lush greenery, and vast landscapes, this earthy hue is commonly associated with the various ancient cults of Mother Earth – Gaia, Ishtar, Inanna, Freya, Ostara – that had its biggest celebrations in Spring when nature seems to reborn and fresh, sparkling green covers the land once again. This could explain why in the European tradition it has been said that green symbolizes rebirth, renewal, immortality, and hope.
Like in Ancient Egypt, where green was associated with the yearly flood of the Nile, so fundamental for vegetation and agriculture, and with the cult of Osiris, the god of the underworld and of rebirth.
Green in Ancient Times
In Ancient Greece, instead, green and blue were sometimes considered the same color, and the same word sometimes described the color of the sea and the color of trees. Aristotle considered that green was located midway between black, symbolizing the earth, and white, symbolizing water.
The Romans as well had a greater appreciation for the color green – associating it with the cult of Venus, protector of gardens, vegetables, and vineyards – and they made a fine green earth pigment that was widely used in wall paintings. In the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the color of clothing showed a person’s social rank and profession: red for the nobility only, brown and gray for peasants, while green was for merchants, bankers, gentry, and their families. The Mona Lisa wears green in her portrait, as does the bride in Arnolfini’s portrait by Jan van Eyck.
Stylization and prohibition
In the XVIII and XIX Centuries, green was associated with the romantic movement in literature and art, seen as the romantic counterpoint and antagonist of the gray and black smoke spreading with the industrial revolution, and consequentially green started being used by political, and ecological movements. The instrumentalization of this affection, made Green become quite of a role player in modern society, politically, ideologically, and marketing-wise.
Hope, regeneration and lucky charm
All said, for this exhibition or homage we didn’t want to impose a specific interpretation of the color green on the artists involved, and yet, by embracing its qualities of the carrier of hope, of the regenerator, of wealth and luck bringer, we aim to make of this show also a ritual, in order to wish to everybody – but particularly to the art world – a fresh, energetic, renewing Spring, changing the vibes of the past years when the time of the rebirth was signed by covid first, and the war with the energetic crisis after. We believe we have all had enough, so shine, green, shine! And bring us positivity.
artists:
Yvonne Andreini
Yvonne Andreini explores the contrasts between painting and drawing, logic and feeling, ideas and reality. Playing with the surface of the canvas, using both paint and ink, Yvonne weaves a new fabric of painting where lines become metaphorical threads. Memories of feelings and ideas find expression in them. The floating and falling lines, symbolize how logic and feelings, order and chaos must coexist in communication within and between people. (Artwork in Header Image)
Max Coor
Max Coor’s colorful works explores the optics of the eye and the brain’s perception of color and shapes. In op-art techniques, he creates anamorphoses within paintings. The color coordination of sharp-angled, rhombic or equiangular elements gives spatial definition to geometric bodies, focuses the eye and forces the work to gain volume.
Creating them from different materials, including wood and aluminum, Max Coor challenges the eye of the viewer by playing on the variation of shapes, colors, volumes and senses. He traces the physics of the eye’s optics and questions our perception in general of whether what we see is in fact what it is.
Axel Geis
In the center of Axel Geis’ works is a human figure. But these are not portraits, Axel mainly uses films as his source of motifs, from where he ejects characters or entire scenes. Separating the original figures from their narrative context, the artist makes their individual features to disguise, and the figures to merge with their surroundings.
It is here where the artist’s search for the human dimension appears behind the reproduced image. It is in their abstraction that the overall human dimension behind becomes vivid and touching. The rest is pure painting, mysterious and vanishing, that blurs the boundaries between the familiar and makes us read between the lines, see the unseen.
Pablo Griss
Pablo Griss explores the visual possibilities of energy and its qualities: magnetic fields, radiation, resonance, currents and electromagnetic waves. He illustrates how these physical phenomena relate to some of my inner existential reflections; if you look closely, most of our actions reflect these occurrences.
In his work, contrasts, repetition, color palette, austere lines, clear contours, balanced, elegant precision, and symmetry are synthesized in the retina and displayed on the surface of the painting as an image of a “magnetic field”: vibrations beyond simple visual effects are themselves a phenomenon. His work straightforwardly hits the point where human consciousness meets the subconscious. He speaks of metaphysics from a philosophical point of view, reflecting on what happens beyond the materia.
Katrin Kampmann
Katrin Kampmann’s research lies in the realm of the reality of non-conformity. She mixes different techniques, planning on the fine line between abstraction and figuration. People appear in her work as shadows of themselves, images of themselves through the perception of others, the prism of artistic perception, and association, but not only.
How random it is reminiscent of the method itself, combining randomness and control, allowing the liquid paints to gather on the surface and flow into each other.
Michael Kunze
“Water, gold, bright fire at night, sun” (Franz Dornseiff, Pindars Stil, 1921), – Michael Kunze takes this as an epigraph to his works. Michael Kunze draws inspiration from the so-called “shadow line of modernism”, his paintings are undergirded by Central European intellectualism, often inspired by works from the 15th to the 18th Centuries, and driven by ideals and metaphysics.
Piet Mondrian’s esoteric geometricism and Gerhard Merz’s idealistic spatial constructions provide clues to Kunze’s art. Kunze’s complex, architectural worlds conceal many mysteries, and yet his subjects remain artificial and based on mental constructs. His paintings are paradoxical and anti-modern: labyrinthine structures find themselves in the midst of landscapes that are both arcade and futuristic, holding both times in the same pictorial plane.
Painting gives the artist enormous freedom. It allows him to combine the real and the imagined, to cross time, to intersperse personal memories with found images, and to root these disparate sources in the ground and context of his choice.
Recognized as one of Germany’s iconic artists, he was honored in 2013 with a major retrospective at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, featuring works spanning the past two decades as well as a major publication. Earlier this year, the artist won the prestigious Hans-Platšek Prize in Karlsruhe, Germany. His works are in numerous public and private collections, such as the National Gallery in Berlin, the MMK Museum in Frankfurt, the Goetz Collection in Munich, etc.
Nikolaus List
Nikolaus List has chosen the trees as the main subject of his painting. In his phantasmagoric landscapes of Nikolaus List with imposing trees of various shapes, spherical poplars reminiscent of river mouths, stone, marble, or volcanic formations, intertwined branches.
More as a metaphor for life the forest becomes for the artist the world as such but also reflects its intricacies, its light, and its dark sides. On the other hand, Nicolaus leaves room for aesthetic and speculative transformation and recreation.
Daniel Mohr
Daniel Mohr splits the world apart, and explores aspects of it one by one. For example, mesmerizing movement. Using only brush and paint, and choosing a special painting primer, he paints calm, landscapes that radiate inner peace. This tranquil motif is broken up by vertical stripes resembling reflections of displaced glass surfaces. In this way, the impression is created that the viewer himself is in motion.
Lea Mugnaini
Lea Mugnaini’s artistic process is based on rethinking the environment in which she lives and works, transforming the present or the past into new symbols. Her organic sculptures intertwine memory, perception and imagination, resulting in layered objects-metaphors.
Form for Lea is a trace of life that, through its transformation, continues to tell the essence of a pre-existing time, but also the reality of the current moment. Her sculptures are echoes of the present, filled with voices from the past, they are tactile and filled with all-understanding, the patina of time and its contemporary reinterpretations.
Johanna Silbermann
The paintings of Berlin-based artist Johanna Silbermann are defined by her intention to paint simultaneously abstract and figurative. For all the recognizability of her subjects, her paintings are like dreams, at least in terms of shifting format and perspective, intertwining different realities and indistinctness.
She plays on a slight attractive blur combined with an aesthetic of emptiness and incompleteness of the painting itself, a certain “non finito.” It doesn’t seem difficult to decipher palms, leaves, snares and ferns dance in magical pictorial spaces in which this dreamlike reality is revealed and surrealist magic emerges. In her melancholic cosmos, people always remain distant, the alien in the unknown and an overarching realm of the sadness as light as summer rain, but at the same time as piercing as the north wind.
Bettina Weiss
In her paintings, Bettina Weiss creates a matrix of changing shapes and colors by coordinating sharp-angled, rhombus, prismatic elements illustrating the principle of micro- and macrocosm of the Universe. The reduction to clear square or prismatic forms, as well as radial and fan-shaped associations of color fields, is combined with the well-balanced color palette of each painting. Like an ornament, they are a figurative pattern, reflecting the laconic boundary of the all-over principle: the works could expand endlessly into the room, but instead gain their determination and graphic quality just through this boundary.
The artist combines oil and acrylic paints, whose unconventional layering and reworking reveals countless nuances of a single color on even the smallest surfaces. The fragility created by the layering of paints, which are separated by a mask in the process of creation, allows for a difference in height that is barely visible to the eye. This creates another element of tension and allows the color and figure fields to tie together.
#Dialogue
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