Opening – 16 NOV 2024, 1-6 pm
16 NOV until 21 DEC 2024

At Potsdamer Straße 97

Opening hours – TUE until SAT: 11am – 6 pm

ChertLüdde presents A soft edge to break a sword, a group exhibition featuring works by Monia Ben Hamouda, Stephanie Comilang, Patrizio di Massimo, Kasia Fudakowski, Petrit Halilaj, Heike Kabisch, Wilhelm Klotzek, Zora Mann, Beatriz Morales, Sofia Salazar Rosales, Young-jun Tak, Tyra Tingleff, Álvaro Urbano, Zhibo Wang and Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt.

Hosted at the gallery’s temporary space at Potsdamer Straße 97, the exhibition brings together a diverse array of artistic approaches. From etching and stitching to painting and welding, the show underscores the subversive tools of softness and vulnerability. Together, the show challenges traditional notions of strength to illustrate how a soft edge can have the power to break even the sharpest sword.

Artists’ biographies

Monia Ben Hamouda (1991, Milan, Italy) lives and works between al-Qayrawan and Milan. Ben Hamouda’s practice reflects her Tunisian and Italian heritage, sculpting calligraphic references that blend identity and meaning, with specific emphasis on Islamic rituals, history and medicinal spices through the Islamic tradition of aniconism. Her work has been shown at the MACRO, MAXXI, Istituto Svizzero, La Casa Encendida, Heidelberger Kunstverein, FRAC Corsica and Museion. She is currently a finalist for the MAXXI BVLGARI PRIZE IV and recipient of the Museion Audience Award (2024) and Vordemberge-Gildewart Foundation Grant (2024).

Stephanie Comilang (1980, Toronto, Canada) is a Filipina-Canadian artist living and working between Toronto and Berlin. Her documentary-based works create narratives that look at how our understandings of mobility, capital and labor on a global scale are shaped through various cultural and social factors. Her work has been shown at the Tate Modern, Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum, Hamburger Bahnhof, Tai Kwun Hong Kong, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Julia Stoschek Collection and Haus der Kunst. She was awarded the 2019 Sobey Art Award, Canada’s most prestigious art prize for artists 40 years and younger.

Patrizio di Massimo (1983, Jesi, Italy) lives and works in London. Over the past decade, di Massimo has cultivated a distinct aesthetic that merges figuration with elements from Italian history, particularly drawing inspiration from Baroque tones and dramatic portraiture. His artistic representations exhibit an uncanny and sometimes grotesque quality, exploring various aspects of human nature. His work has been exhibited at Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art, ParaSite, Dhaka Art Summit, Museion, Triennale di Milano, Milan, Castello di Rivoli, Stedelijk Museum, Museo do Arte do Rio, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Villa Medici, EVA International – Ireland’s Biennial of Contemporary Art, Gasworks and Kunsthalle Lisbon.

Kasia Fudakowski (1985, London, England) lives and works in Berlin. Her diverse and playful practice, which includes sculpture, film, performance, and writing, explores social riddles through material encounters, surreal logic and comic theory. Fudakowski’s works refer to the allure and danger of binary categorisation and the subsequent absurdity that it unfolds in our political and social climate, revealing the discrepancies amongst cultural norms. Her work has been exhibited at Leopold-Hoesch-Museum, Kunstverein Düsseldorf, 1646, Centre for Contemporary Art Futura, Harburger Bahnhof and Bauhaus Museum Dessau. She was awarded the Arts Maebashi Prize (2019) and the Otto d’Ame Film Award (2016).

Petrit Halilaj (1986, Kostërrc, Kosovo) lives and works in Berlin. His work is deeply connected to the recent history of his native country Kosovo and the consequences of cultural and political tensions in the region, which he often takes as a starting point for igniting countercurrent poetics for the future. Rooted in his biography, the projects encompass a variety of media, including sculpture, drawing, painting, text and performance. He has exhibited recently at the Met, Museo Tamayo, Tate St Ives; Palacio de Cristal, Museo Reina Sofia and New Museum. He received the Kunstpreis Berlin from the Akademie der Künste in 2023 and was honored with the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (SARF) in 2018. In 2017, he earned both the Mario Merz Prize and a special mention from the jury at the 57th Venice Biennale.

Heike Kabisch (1978, Münster, Germany) lives and works in Berlin. Informed by archival materials, family heirlooms, or objects otherwise facing extinction, Heike Kabisch presents fragmentation as a poetic tool for regeneration. Her practice unfolds across figurative sculpture, installation, drawing, and collage. To capture a sense of vulnerability, her sculptures often have wires, cracks or raw material exposed as a way to resist completion and remain open to revision, chance and time. Her work has been exhibited at Museum voor Moderne Kunst Arnhem, Nomas Foundation, Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Roma, Kunstverein Kirschenpflücker, Künstlerhaus Dortmund, Kunstverein Gelsenkirchen, Kunstmuseum Baden Solingen, Kunstverein Leverkusen and Cornerhouse.

Wilhelm Klotzek (1980, Berlin, Germany) is best known for his sculptures, videos, and performances, interspersed with sound poetry and word jugglings, in which he takes up everyday cultural or even political-historical phenomena. In terms of content, the examination of post-socialist reality is a recurring theme, while at the same time public space and people’s relationship to architecture play an important role. Since 2023 he has been teaching as a professor in the sculpture department at the Berlin Weißensee Art Academy. His works have been on display at DAS MINSK, Schloss Derneburg, Schloss Bellevue, Institut für Kunst und Kontext Berlin, Bibliothek der Gemäldegalerie, Memphis in Linz and ifa-gallery Berlin, among others.

Zora Mann (1979, Amersham, England) lives and works in Berlin. Mann’s identifiable aesthetic ventures into the realms of disparate experiences and scores of interests. Her vibrating, psychedelic expression finds influence in folklore, geometry, dreamlike shifts, vibrant, affective color palettes and surreal repetition that moves in relation to so many other competing movements. Zora Mann’s work has been exhibited at Berlinische Galerie, Villa Arson, Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden Baden, Haus am Lützowplatz, Palais De Tokyo and BKV-Brandenburgischen Kunstverein. 

Beatriz Morales (1981, Mexico City) lives and works between Berlin and Mexico. Morales combines an investigative, abstract-expressionist approach with textile art, fiber art and conceptual components, often realized in monumental installations. As part of her practice, the artist incorporates traditional, pre-hispanic dyeing techniques, both in her work with plant fibers as well as when painting on canvases. Her work has been exhibited at Museo Tamayo, Mexican Painting Biennial, Circle Culture, Chancellery Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art MACAY and Frieder Burda Museum. In 2017, she was shortlisted for the Social Arts Award in Berlin and was the 2006 winner of the Jeune Créateur Prize.

Sofia Salazar Rosales  (1999, Quito, Ecuador) lives and works between Paris, Amsterdam and Quito. In her practice, she often recreates objects tied to her home and surroundings, blending organic and industrial elements. She conceives her pieces as spaces of reconciliation to negotiate between the object, the material and their history throughout different contexts. Reconciling is also a constructive gesture in her work, which continuously transforms the objects with particular focus on their emotional effect. This year, her work is on view at the 17th Contemporary Art Biennial of Lyon and she is currently participating in the two-year residency at De Ateliers in Amsterdam. In 2023, she was nominated for Premio illy Sustain Art Prize and Emerige-CPGA Prize and won the SARR Prize in 2022.

Young-jun Tak (1989, Seoul, South Korea) lives and works in Berlin. In Tak’s artistic practice, he investigates some of the socio-cultural and psychological mechanisms that are part of shaping certain belief systems. Appropriating Christian religious iconographies and anti-LGBTQ+ printed materials, Tak redeploys them together to amplify the dissonances between the devotional imagery and the organizations’ base messaging and actions. His work has been exhibited at Atelier Hermès (Seoul), Julia Stoschek Foundation (Dusseldorf, Berlin), the 4th Bangkok Art Biennale, the High Line (New York), the 5th Chicago Architecture Biennial, the 16th Lyon Biennale, the 11th Berlin Biennale, the 15th Istanbul Biennial, KINDL Centre for Contemporary Art (Berlin), Seoul Museum of Art SeMA Bunker, amongst others. In 2024, he was the winner of the Love at First Sight Prize at the 3rd St. Moritz Art Film Festival.

Tyra Tingleff (1984, Hönefoss, Norway) lives and works between Oslo and Berlin. Typically kept to a portrait format, Tyra Tingleff’s expansive visual world is fluid, punk, unrestrained– limitless. Combining a manifold of techniques in her oil paintings on raw canvas, Tingleff balances vibrant shades and hues that refract like sedimentary layers. Her work has been exhibited at Kunstnerfubundet, SALTS, Kunsthall Oslo; Kunstverein Arnsberg and Kunstnernes Hus. In 2020, she was the recipient of the Fegerstens Stiftelsen Award, Norwegian Cultural Department Scholarship and the Ringerike Sparebankstiftelse Editorial Scholarship. 

Álvaro Urbano (1983, Madrid, Spain) lives and works in Berlin. Urbano’s work involves an archeology of desires and past intentions. By creating atmospheres that replicate specific spaces and architectural gestures, the artist explores the narratives that are embedded in these built bodies. These staged realities are inhabited by vegetal and animal elements, only from a close distance these entities reveal themselves as intricate organic simulations. His work has recently been exhibited at TEA Tenerife Espacio de las Artes, SculptureCenter, Bergen Assembly, Storefront for Art and Architecture, MACBA Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 24th Biennale of Sydney and Hamburger Bahnhof. 

Zhibo Wang (1981, Zhejiang) lives and works in Berlin. Zhibo’s practice surveys the absurd spectrum of what is real – geographically, historically, ethnographically, architecturally. She creates oil on canvas paintings that confound our notions of time and space. Transcending traditionalism through the subject matter depicted, which is both curious and challenging, Wang channels her painting to represent the variances of our visual experiences, similar to the reflection on the surface of water: capable of capturing the multiple manifolds of a subject. Her work has been exhibited at the Taipei Contemporary Art Museum, Shanghai Art Museum, Aranya Art Center, Times Art Center, Villa Vassilieff, Chongqing Art Museum, and Penrith Regional Art Gallery. In 2008, she won the prestigious national Luo Zhongli Scholarship.

Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt (1932, Wurzen – 2024, Berlin, Germany) was born in Wurzen, Saxony, and after the war she settled in Berlin. Despite not having a formal artistic education, she produced paintings, pastels, drawings and most notably what she calls “typewritings”. Works on paper made on a typewriter, the typewritings are intricate studies spanning concrete poetry, linguistics, graphic design and conceptual art – innovative hybrids of language, symbols and visual form. Although in the beginning of her practice Wolf-Rehfeldt explored semiotics and concrete poetry, she began to shift her focus in later years to abstract compositions, moving from linguistic signage to language as form and matter. Her work has been exhibited at DAS MINSK Potsdam,  Sammlung Schering Stiftung im Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin,  MAMCO, Kunstverein Reutlingen, Tirana National Gallery of Arts, Albertinum, Hamburger Bahnhof, Malmö Konsthall, documenta 14, Museum für konkrete Kunst, Museum Barberini, Kunstnernes Hus,  Martin Gropius Bau, Schloss Plüschow Museum and The Weserburg Study Centre / Museum of Modern Art Bremen. Wolf-Rehfeldt was awarded with the Gerhard-Altenbourg Prize of the Lindenau-Museums 2021 and the Hannah Höch Prize 2022.

11 JAN until 22 FEB 2025

In Controlling Chaos, ChertLüdde presents a selection of historic works by Canadian artist Vincent Trasov (1947, Edmonton, Canada), who lives and works in both Germany and Canada. Delving into the dynamic interplay between creation and destruction, the solo show presents process-driven paintings stemming from various fire performances and a series of heat-treated works on paper. Made in Berlin during the 1980s and 1990s, these artworks—with their surfaces uniquely distressed, burned or streaked with chemical reactions—are lively interjections within the artist’s broader Gesamtkunstwerk centered around the figure of Mr. Peanut. This iconic project spanning drawing and performance, alongside his collaborations with Michael Morris (1942, Saltdean, UK – 2022, Brentwood Bay, Canada) on the Image Bank, differ from what is on display as they dive deeper into themes of consumer fetishism and the interconnectedness of imagery. Controlling Chaos shifts focus more locally, exploring Trasov’s engagement with his immediate environment and nature.

Central to the exhibition are video documentations such as Flammable, a film of Trasov’s 1969 fire performance in Vancouver, in which he ignited a cache of 13 flammable objects to investigate processes of consumption, provocatively associating them with the cultural milieu. Inspired by Yves Klein’s fire paintings, Trasov began incorporating naturally combustible materials into his artist practice in the 1970s, establishing a ritualistic process that he would later revive in Berlin after a decade-long break from this practice.

The works displayed at ChertLüdde trace their origins back to the artist’s 1981 residency with the Berliner Künstlerprogramm des DAAD in Berlin with Morris. This second phase of his process paintings, titled Berliner Bilder, captures raw elements transformed by flames, with banner-like canvases marked by fire and snow juxtaposed against bold geometric forms. Morris once described these processbased artworks as “by-products of investigation,” reflecting Trasov’s fascination with ephemerality, echoed in the unpredictability of his later heat-treated works on paper. In Boys’ Choir, words such as “BOY,” “JUNGE,” and “GARÇON” appear on chemically processed paper, each word carrying its own cultural resonance. These works follow a similar series titled Female Voices. Both series were originally accompanied by a collaborative video with Morris, vocalizing the distortions and mutilations of modernist ideals. Created with metal stencils from East Berlin, the heat-processed pages explore the tension between the standardization provided by these design tools of the former Socialist state and the unpredictability of the creative process. Using copper sulfate directly on the paper, Trasov transformed the artworks into a metaphor for his own resistance to homogeneity.

Adding an unexpected layer of intrigue to the Boys’ Choir series, the reverse sides, as shown in the exhibition, contain a hidden dimension: repurposed sketches by Michael Morris from another point in time. These further change the authorship of the work and all the unique processes and influences behind the pieces in Controlling Chaos. Moreover, the artworks are deeply connected to the location in which they were created, resonating with the avant-garde spirit that characterized Berlin’s cultural landscape before and shortly after the fall of the Berlin wall.

BIOGRAPHY

Vincent Trasov (1947, Edmonton, Canada) is a painter, video and performance artist. Deeply involved in the development of networks, his work is often media-based and has a collaborative spirit. Image Bank, which he cofounded in 1970 with Michael Morris, facilitated an international method for personal exchange of information between artists. Using aliases that frequently changed, Image Bank was a subversive project reworking images and text found in mainstream media.

´Since 1971, Trasov has been working with video. It was around the same time that Trasov assumed the alter ego Mr. Peanut through performances, Mail Art, happenings, exhibitions, drawings and sculptures. Many of these performances as Mr. Peanut were recorded on tape, including his campaign as Mayor of Vancouver in 1974.

In 1973, he was co-founder and co-director of Western Front Society, Vancouver, a center for the production and presentation of new art activity. In 1981, he was invited with Morris as a guest of Berliner Künstlerprogramm des DAAD to Berlin. Ten years later, the two founded the Morris/Trasov Archive, now in the collection of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver, to research contemporary art and communication. Trasov has had numerous international exhibitions and is represented in public and private collections in both Europe and North America.

At present, he continues to live and work in Germany and Canada. While in Germany, he helped to establish the Werkstatt Brandenstein, a production and presentation center for contemporary art in Brandenstein, Saxony-Anhalt.

11 JAN until 22 FEB 2025

ChertLüdde is pleased to present In the end something begins with us, an exhibition that delves into the early-career paintings of Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt (1932, Wurzen – 2024, Berlin, Germany), which laid the foundation for her formal and theoretical exploration throughout her artistic journey. A decade after the gallery’s first exhibition with Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt (Signs Fiction, 10 January – 28 March 2015), this upcoming show spans 30 years of artistic evolution, tracing her work which began in the 1960s and ended in 1989 with her decision to step away from artistic pursuits after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Wolf-Rehfeldt, a self-taught artist from the former East Germany, is best known for her work with concrete poetry and intricate typewriter compositions, which began in the early 1970s. Despite the political pressures of the time, Ruth WolfRehfeldt maintained great freedom of language and expression. During this period, she exhibited internationally, but it was only after a prolonged hiatus that renewed interest in her work began to emerge in recent years. This resurgence culminated in her receiving the prestigious Hannah Höch Prize in 2022, followed also by a major retrospective at Potsdam’s DAS MINSK in 2023.

The upcoming exhibition at ChertLüdde contextualizes still life paintings, fabric studies, abstract works and portraits with various preparatory drawings, collages and typewriter artworks. Excerpts from her diaries, sketches, poems and notes also complement and expand the motifs explored in the artworks, providing a window into her creative process and highlighting some of the major themes in her practice, such as humanity’s fraught relationships with nature and culture. This exhibition represents a comprehensive and archival endeavor to showcase the artist’s meticulous approach to art-making, made possible by her unwavering dedication to her research and thorough documentation of her processes. “Futile as it may be in the end,” Wolf-Rehfeldt once wrote, “I must document how little I am able to create.” This modest reflection, taken from an unpublished manuscript from the 1960s, encapsulates the impulses behind the artist’s research into the human condition, particularly concerning creativity. This text, from which the title of the show also stems, will be presented at the gallery. 

In commemoration of the first anniversary of Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt’s passing on February 26, 2024, the exhibition will feature Divided Planet (1970/2024), a public artwork displayed in the lightbox above the gallery entrance. Additionally, responses to the gallery’s Mail Art Open Call, inspired by the original typewritten artwork Divided Planet from 1970, will be showcased through a special presentation in the gallery’s bookstore.

BIOGRAPHY

Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt (1932, Wurzen – 2024, Berlin, Germany) is a Berlinbased artist best known for her visual poetry and mail art. Despite not having a formal artistic education, she produced paintings, pastels, drawings and what she calls “typewritings”. Works on paper made on a typewriter, her typewritings are intricate studies spanning concrete poetry, linguistics, graphic design and conceptual art – innovative hybrids of language, symbols and visual form. Although in the beginning of her practice Wolf-Rehfeldt explored semiotics and concrete poetry, she began to shift her focus in later years to abstract compositions, moving from linguistic signage to language as form and matter.

During the period of her artistic production, Wolf-Rehfeldt was simultaneously engaged with a vast network of artists, known as the Mail Art Movement. Wolf-Rehfeldt and her partner Robert Rehfeldt were pioneers within the GDR of a type of artistic exchange that allowed for the uncensored circulation of art and ideas. As works of art prone to accessible distribution, Wolf-Rehfeldt’s typewritings were often included in her correspondence with other artists.

After the fall of the Berlin wall and the death of her partner, Wolf-Rehfeldt stopped making work altogether. Her newly found geographical freedom had fundamentally altered the function of making and distributing art. In recent years, a newly invigorated interest in her work had begun to emerge. Most recently, Wolf-Rehfeldt was awarded the Gerhard Altenbourg Prize 2021 and the Hannah Höch Prize 2022.

Her work has been exhibited in venues such as MAMCO, Geneva; National Gallery of Arts, Tirana; Albertinum, SKD, Dresden; Goethe, Minneapolis; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Malmö Konsthall, Malmö; Documenta 14, Kassel; Museum für konkrete Kunst, Ingolstadt; Museum Barberini, Potsdam; Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo; Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin; Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen.