Künstlerhaus Bethanien
To achieve these goals, the Künstlerhaus Bethanien organises a wide range of events ranging from monthly exhibition openings to private and public studio visits (“Open Studios”). The focus of its manifold missions is the International Studio Programme, where artists from around the world conceive and present new projects with the help of its team. The Künstlerhaus Bethanien continually strives to expand its international network by securing new partnerships.
The Künstlerhaus furthermore encourages critical reflection on subjects related to contemporary art and culture through its wide range of publications, among which artists’ and exhibition catalogues as well as the Be Magazine, a yearly journal for art and criticism. The present booklet provides readers with extensive information on the institution’s activities and this year’s artists-in-residence.
In his new work, the artist Nicolae Comănescu, currently residing at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, presents textile works that are part of a concept called The Great General Scheme of all Things. With this concept, Comănescu had already attracted attention in 2020. At the Invitro Gallery in Cluj (Romania) he showed one of his first major works, created entirely from garments. It was, together with a series of overlapping drawings, which referred to significant movements in post-communist Romania, the gallery’s central piece.
His well-known practice is the accumulation of materials, that he has encountered in various places he has wandered through or lived in. He integrates these materials into his works in a versatile way. Forms can be dust, ash, slag, powder, textiles, etc.
The new arrangement consists of garments that the artist acquired during his stay in Berlin.
In 15 works, exhibited in his residential studio in Berlin, he integrates objects from German culture. These objects, shelves from the famous DIY store Bauhaus, become part of brackets on which the garments are brought together. As soon as they are reused, the shelves lose their original meaning and become carriers of a new cultural exchange between Romania and Germany.
For the Artevezi magazine he explained:
“The Grand General Scheme of all Things is always an overlap of layers of meanings, a hyperinflation of visual information by folding and packing personal histories in what appears at first glance to be a volume of color”.
During the exhibition, the artist will present one of his latest concepts, the site-specific video-installation Looking at the Big Picture from the inside, shows a mis-en-scène of the theme escape from an “institutional” space. The installation is built on a structure which consists of furniture from the artist’s home and items of clothing from people close to him.
Künstlerhaus Bethanien is celebrating 50 years of creativity, artistic innova- tion, and international exchange. It has fostered countless talents — from its launch in 1974 as a haven for emerging artists, to its current status as a global center of culture.
Künstlerhaus Bethanien is a place where artists from different disciplines and cultural backgrounds meet and share ideas, both with each other and with an engaged audience. In the spirit of sharing and exchange, Künstlerhaus Betha- nien has a variety of exhibition formats and opportunities to interface with the public, including monthly exhibition openings, performances, concerts, artist talks, and specially curated studio visits; each year there are also several open studios. One focus of these wide-ranging activities is the International Studio Programme, which each year invites artists from all over the world to develop and present projects with the support of the Künstlerhaus Bethanien team.
Künstlerhaus Bethanien is constantly striving to expand its international net- work and gain new partners for the Programme, endeavoring to critically reflect on developments in contemporary art and culture. Publishing artists’ books, exhibition catalogues, and the annual art and criticism journal Be Magazin are just some of the ways in which Künstlerhaus Bethanien achieves this goal.
Participants in the International Studio Programme are given the opportunity to develop and realize projects within a set timeframe, as well as being encou- raged to reflect on and further their own artistic position within the Berlin art context. What sets Künstlerhaus Bethanien apart is its emphasis on providing participating artists with individual support as well as networking opportuni- ties with the Berlin art scene.
On the occasion of its 50th anniversary, Künstlerhaus Bethanien reaffirms its commitment to supporting inventiveness, diversity, and experimentation in the constantly evolving landscape of contemporary art.
Douglas Kolk (1963, Newark—2014, Boston) was a USA-born and based artist whose life and practice were closely intertwined with Berlin’s artistic milieu of the 1990s. Kolk’s work revolved around questions of identity, initially through small-format drawings and later through large-format collages combined with painting. The exhibition at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, featuring Douglas Kolk’s works from the collections in Berlin, marks his first retrospective in more than a decade, inviting us to rethink the current image of the 1990s pop culture. Kolk delved into processes of self-loss and self-recognition through identification with youth subcultures, to which he was particularly sensitive in terms of their visual dialects.
Kolk extracted clichés from various media of his era—the language of advertisement and glamour in the 1980s and early 1990s, commercialised underground culture, drug addiction, apocalyptic prophecies, anime, popular movies such as Matrix, bands like Depeche Mode,—and repurposed those as recycled material in his artistic production. Kolk’s characters, sometimes high but always trendy and stylish, are trapped in a perpetual search for themselves. Yet, what they encounter are only phrases reminiscent of lines from rock hits or magazine headlines: “everyday is everyday, Boys”; “This isn’t home, forest girl”. These words, alongside casts of popular media images and graffiti tags, explain nothing, paving the way for the melancholy and repetitiveness within the series. Some of Kolk’s heroes and heroines, unable to define themselves in any other manner, reveal themselves through a grotesque emotional display—the embodiment of their presence. As the art historian Oliver Zybok puts it, Kolk’s works show that the human being who becomes the object of their own investigation is so complexly human that it cannot be explained with concepts derived from scientific theories.
The artist himself noted that the 1990s were big for him. During that time, Kolk achieved success with his first group show at New York’s David Zwirner and started a long-lasting collaboration with Matthias Arndt, resulting in Kolk’s personal exhibitions at Arndt & Partner in Berlin in 1994, 1998, and 2006. Kolk also presented solo exhibitions at Kasseler Kunstverein, Künstlerverein Malkasten (Dusseldorf), Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst (Ghent), Kunsthalle St. Gallen, and Stephen Friedman Gallery (London).
With kind support from the Arndt Art Agency Berlin, Melbourne