Published 3 DEC 2024

16 NOV until 21 DEC 2024
At Potsdamer Strasse 81b, 10785 Berlin

Galerie Thomas Schulte presents Everything but the Kitchen Sink in the gallery’s recently opened space on Potsdamer Straße. The title of the exhibition, derived from the English idiom—meaning an abundance of things—at once showcases the multiplicity of voices and positions present in the gallery’s program while interrogating the place of everyday objects and their associated meanings. The exhibition facilitates a conversation between artists who have been with the gallery since its inception in the early 1990s and those who have been included in the program more recently. Everything but the Kitchen Sink thus offers an expansive view of the gallery’s diverse positions over the last 35 years.

At the same time, the show presents a framework for connecting a range of artistic approaches that engage with everyday life while resisting a literal interpretation. The idiom itself evokes multiple associations, including the notion of unreliable narration, whose flourishes forgo accuracy, destabilizing a story’s relationship to reality in ways that may or may not be immediately evident. Despite the apparent diversity of positions and material approaches in the artists’ works, a shared characteristic among them is a tendency to transform ordinary objects and re-contextualize them, while maintaining their connection to the familiar and the ubiquitous. In so doing, the works disrupt and play with the relationship between material objects and anticipations of meaning and categorization.

This interaction between object and anticipated meaning is playfully expressed in Rebecca Horn’s kinetic sculpture Grillon III (1995), The work at first appears like a mysterious little machine that produces a gentle noise reminiscent of a cricket. However, upon closer inspection the work reveals itself as a construction of ready-made objects—a hair comb, gears, and screws assembled to produce a cricket chirp, playing with the association offered by its title. Like Horn’s work, which detaches ready-made objects from their expected use, Four Perfect Vehicles (1992) by Allan McCollum, similarly plays with the connection between seemingly familiar forms and their anticipated meaning or function. In so doing, McCollum explores the intersections of artefact and commodity, as well as the tension between uniqueness and mass production. The four vessel-like objects serve no functional purpose; instead, they exist as silhouettes—acting as screens for various projections. These domestic objects made emphatically decorative, become fictitious in nature, much like props in a larger narrative.

P (2024), a hand-woven tapestry by Willem de Rooij, investigates meaning-making by analyzing the production and labor behind the object itself. The tapestry appears as a reduced geometric shape in monochrome yellow, stretched and installed like a canvas. By referencing a conventional format, the work calls into question the artwork’s relationship to broader aesthetic and referential systems, particularly within their exhibited context. Its meticulousness, as well as the time, labor, and craft behind its production, unfold alongside a perceived anonymity. Julian Irlinger’s series Cel Animation Background (2024) similarly plays with the association between meanings and their conduits, or rather how meanings are consumed and what materials are used to carry or display these meanings. Thus, stripping the image down to its background—something that usually is expected to provide a setting or context for foregrounded action and meaning-making—it surfaces as a detachment from the production and narratives behind it. Painted in the the quintessential style of a mid-century-modern animation, the series shows scene scapes emptied of any action and characters, it opens a space that one might instinctively fill with familiar associations while undergirding a sense of longing for foregrounded action and meaning.

This sense of symbolic foregrounding is palpable in Stephen Willats’ multi-panel wall installation Signs and Messages From Corporate America (1988), which examines the ways in which the objects and images that compose the everyday, reveal how they are organized and within systems of meaning. The work was produced by the artist based on first-hand interactions with employees at Merrill Lynch HQ in New York. A spattering of skewed photographic images of different sizes and colors form a chaotic cluster, like a stack of papers that has been tossed up in the air. A towering facade floats alongside small, personal office effects and trinkets, as well as logos bearing omnipresent symbols—modes of self-expression in interaction with and subsumed by those of the corporate working environment. In this way, the work serves as a kind of meta-discursive mapping of social structures, systems, and relationships. Likewise, an interplay of image and object in Hanna Stiegeler’s silkscreen prints from the series Curiosity Gap (2022) shows how mundane photos intended to manipulate have themselves been manipulated. Close-up digital images from seductive clickbait advertisements, typically juxtaposed with sensationalist headlines, are presented as abstracted and layered objects. Taken out of context, the images’ repetitions are enhanced; their simultaneous pervasiveness and elusivity made material.

The question of an object’s authenticity, in relation to its value and meaning, can be considered through another pair of works. In Maria Loboda’s Warrior with a Baroque Pearl Earring (2024) and Warrior with a Green Agate Earring (2024), two head-sized pieces of petrified wood sit atop a pedestal. Like fragments of an ancient sculpture eroded by time, they no longer resemble a head: identifiable only by a single earring that seems to dangle from an absent ear. It could be a display in an archeological museum, or else a jewelry shop—as the handmade earrings, which recall vintage designs by luxury fashion brands, imparts an asynchronous quality. A new sculpture by José Montealegre takes the form of a personal article with a connection to the body: Desterrado (2024)—meaning banished, dispossesed, or even landless—is a 15th-century-style suit of armor made of copper and lying horizontally on a low plinth. It appears to be a historical relic, the hollowed-out remnants of what has been lost, but presents us with a layering of fictions and narrative references. Some of the armor’s plates are fastened together with heart-shaped lockets, like those which close shut a diary or ones left by lovers to adorn bridges—a melding of seemingly discordant elements which belie the story behind the sculpture.

Similarly concealed dynamics are dissected by Lena Henke in her work The definition of motherhood in our culture is one in which the mother sacrifices herself to the child. She sacrifices herself. Her self is lost. The child becomes the center of her life; the child’s needs are placed before her needs, until often, she lives in her child, through her child, placing her spirit in the child’s body, until the merging of her self with the child is complete. (2022). Installed on the wall, a ceramic lily pad with a glazed, shiny and intricate surface, has been sliced into sections like a pie chart. A structure from the natural environment is abstracted to represent a socially constructed one. The commonness of its circular form and its changed orientation flip a specific object into a more totalizing symbol while elaborating an experience that is highly personal in nature.

23 NOV until 11 JAN 2025
At Charlottenstrasse 24, 10117 Berlin

At Galerie Thomas Schulte, Franka Hörnschemeyer presents her walk-in spatial sculpture Blindtext (2009) in the gallery’s Corner Space, alongside a selection of drawings. The overall structure of Blindtext takes the form of a hexagon, composed of aluminum honeycomb panels on top of a raised platform. Its labyrinthine internal system of doors and narrow passageways encloses and divides the space, as new ones are opened, altering the ways it is maneuvered and perceived.

Initially exhibited at Hamburger Kunsthalle, here, Blindtext brings another atmosphere through its interactions with the spatial registers of the gallery and its surroundings. The interwoven architectures of the tall display windows and the work’s vertical, reflective metal panels draw the viewers and interior space into interplay with passersby and the street outside. Oscillations are produced: between obstruction and seeing-through structural layers. The hexagonal form is echoed from the panels’ inner layer, glimpsed along the material’s edges, to the installation itself, and outward to the gallery’s exterior architecture—foregrounding the work as a space within a space. As it is navigated through and around from inside and out, there is a visible negotiation of spatial relationships that extends beyond its physical and material conditions. Reflections on the work’s moveable surfaces generate spectral impressions at times, as though in a state of dissolution—giving shape to the immaterial aspects that structure space.

In her work, Hörnschemeyer engages with the construction of space, not just materially, but also socially and historically. Here, the work’s hexagonal shape, like the honeycomb of a beehive, is one of symmetry, balance, and harmony, connected to notions of community, group formation and group mindedness. Its form is recurrent in the structures and patterns of natural and built environments—favored for its spatial and material efficiency, and, as in the panels used here, for providing stability based on mutual support. In Blindtext, these elements are set against feelings of ambivalence and unease induced by an interior that recalls a house of mirrors. The regularity of the geometric form is interrupted by the shifts and uncertainty within this system, which alternatingly affords structural clarity and opacity, mobility and its limitations. Elements that yield to movement, positioned in variable angles and relationships to one another, produce changing stratifications of material. The spaces that open up in between give a sense of porousness. While, from some perspectives, the structure might appear as a closed box—an impression that is reinforced by the aluminum honeycomb panels, which have insulating properties, teetering between protective and confining. 

Hörnschemeyer works with found and recycled industrial materials that often underscore an ephemeral nature, even though they are ever-present in our surroundings. Such aluminum panels are not only used in architecture, but also in different forms of transport—suffusing them with a transient quality that is compounded by their lightweight portability. The materials she uses, which she considers important carriers of information, are also usually left in a raw, untreated state and in standard dimensions. Marks and traces are retained as the materials are transformed from one situation to another.

Presented here is also a series of translucent ink and pastel crayon drawings from 1988, in which we see Hörnschemeyer’s long-term considerations of space and material crystallized in another medium. The drawings are diptychs in which layering and separation simultaneously occur. One drawing in each comprises a loose rectangular form with clean black lines, the inside of which is smudged with blots, like a Rorschach. The second drawing in the set is a composite of a similarly defined frame, though not exact, inside of a more organic, amorphous spatial field. Between 1987 and 1988, Hörnschemeyer lived in New York, where she developed a deep and sustained interest in drywall, as a commonly, yet temporarily used material that seemed to be in constant motion, between construction and destruction. In these drawings, we might be reminded of the rugged edges of broken drywall, a hole in the wall that produces a new space, while revealing its underlying material structure. This material rawness—that which is concealed, but structures a space—is what, in the drawings, seems to extend from the rectangular frame, giving fluid form to the space beyond.

Blindtext (filler, or placeholder text) is something that holds place. Though graphically composed of familiar structures, it is made obtuse. Hörnschemeyer creates situations for materials, and for us, which bear a reflection of our built environment, disclosing information that is embedded within it, and at the same time contain their own inner workings to be deciphered. Within this system of relations, perception and understanding are activated through an experiential, physical engagement with how spaces are shaped and the ways in which they, in turn, shape us.

23 NOV until 11 JAN 2025
At Charlottenstrasse 24, 10117 Berlin

With Compressing Light, Galerie Thomas Schulte presents its first solo exhibition of Nancy Haynes, featuring a selection of small-scale paintings from her ongoing library series (since 2017). Intimate linen canvases of slightly varying dimensions that approximate those of a book, the paintings tend towards the monochromatic, emptied out, yet subtly geometric. In their subtlety, however, they speak volumes.

Titled after writers of influence and importance to Haynes, the paintings in the series unfold like a personal library. We find the names of figures whose work spans generations, disciplines, and genres: among them, Hannah Arendt, Franz Kafka, Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Svetlana Alexievich, and Zora Neale Hurston, to name a few. Alongside such literary figures, other influences are quickly called to mind: for instance, the toned-down, contemplative still-life paintings of Giorgio Morandi, which, though strikingly consistent in appearance, display a masterful rendering of nuance. As we draw in close to study the library paintings, as we read their names, their multiplicity becomes evident: even within the limits of a small canvas and a minimal, muted palette, a vast swath of expression is achieved. Interactions of surface and light change with each iteration, producing distinct movements and varying degrees of luminosity, color and contrast. The surface of each painting is not uniform either: moments of quiet brush up against tumult; flashes of light seem to suddenly recede into darkness; emphatic gestures give way to smooth, spectral transitions. It is not, after all, a single book that the paintings cite, but rather, in essence, an entire body of work—how it is regarded and understood.

Nancy Haynes works in a mostly layered process, through repeated applications of thin coats of paint. The painting’s smoothness is accentuated, as is the density of the paint and its accumulations. This series predominantly consists of shades of black and white, mixing into a variety of grays, as well as mostly earthy greens. She has often worked with lamp black, considered to be the deepest, richest black. Derived from soot, its color is thick as coal. It is a residue, suffused with the passing of time, a distillation of memory. This association extends through her use of sfumato—a technique that is dense with art historical references of its own.

In the luminosity produced by shifts in register, we might think of what Haynes refers to as ‘literary tenebrism’. Light, and how it can be captured in a painted surface, is an ongoing point of fascination for the artist. Though elemental to it, its presence in painting is an illusion. In her works, this potential is activated, as something immaterial that can also give shape to immaterial things—situating light and its illusive capacity within abstract painting. The sfumato that sprawls over, filling the paintings’ center, becomes a particular source of its energy, movement, and dissolution. It echoes the repetitive motions and changing gradations of a scanner, which, pressing light up against a glass from below, brings something to form at the same time as it dematerializes it. Here, light is not only something external, or on the surface, like a reflection on oil paint. It is inner space.

Another comparison that has been made in connection to Haynes’ paintings becomes increasingly relevant: at times, they recall the black, shiny, rectangular screens of digital devices, which likewise make it possible to condense an author’s complete oeuvre into a surface. Similar interactions occur between reflections on top and a glow from within. In some of the paintings, unruly motions that visibly smudge the surface could remind of smeared fingerprints on a touch-screen display. These marks, however ephemeral, hold a personal record of interactions with content that is always in motion: elusive impressions that continuously slide by in swipes and scrolls.

A smooth surface and the liquid character of paint facilitate a flow of movement as if through the slippery substance of the mind. Accumulations and the processing of knowledge, influences, passions, and interests induce shifts over time, as comings and goings outside of a linear progression. Each painting carries a kind of bibliography, alongside the forces of thought and feeling that moved the painter to paint it. They allude to the artist’s memory of their reference material, as well as the very process of its being remembered.

Haynes’ paintings, in effect, take on a processual dimension. Whereas the sfumato comes to embody time itself—illustrating its passage in a conceptual approach that draws inspiration from the work of On Kawara—the paintings’ edges tell a more specific story. Loose strokes in rough horizontal bars at the top and bottom, or disruptions in the paintings’ corners, tentatively frame and compress the gradient in between. For Haynes, these outer limits offer glimpses into the painting’s history: a stratification that reveals the layers of its coming into being, as well as that which is still present underneath, both being brought to light and obscured by its glare.

Encounters with Haynes’ library paintings prompt a meditative process, similar to that of their own development—in the contemplative silence that fills the duration in between drying layers of paint. Time moves and is felt differently. It slows down, condenses, meets the pace of our own thoughts, their manifold wanderings, even gaps, before getting stirred up with the disquiet of emotion. Perpetual transitions and fluctuations, however minute, illuminate a state of impermanence, as though nearly coming into focus and fading away again with the turn of a page. 

18 JAN until 1 MAR 2025
Opening – 17 JAN 2025, 6-9 pm
At Potsdamer Strasse 81b, 10785 Berlin

18 JAN until 8 MAR 2025
Opening – 24 JAN 2025, 7-9 pm
At Charlottenstrasse 24, 10117 Berlin