25 Jun 2013

Kunsthalle Tübingen presents Birgit Brenner: Forever and Always

Monopol magazine celebrates Birgit Brenner as one of the 'most radical contemporary artists.' The Berlin-based professor at the Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design creates her works out of the dramas of everyday life. Brenner has developed her largest installation to date for the Kunsthalle Tübingen. The three-dimensional sketches out of cardboard join together to become a plot that the visitor can enter. The theme in Tübingen is a traffic accident and the repercussions it has for those involved. In the staging, which is accompanied by punch lines, the particular incident escalates to become a tragicomedy common to all humankind.

A truck plows into a house. That is how it all begins. Anyone visiting the exhibition by Birgit Brenner can experience how this event influences the life of the truck driver and the couple who live in the house. The small and the great dramas of everyday life are the stuff out of which the artist creates her works. She combs illustrated magazines, television, Internet forums for spree killers and people at the risk of committing suicide, and life itself. She has developed her largest installation to date for the Kunsthalle Tübingen. The exhibition resembles the three-dimensional storyboard of a docudrama. Exhibition visitors are encouraged to enter the story in the truest sense of the word. Brenner sketchily unfolds her story in a film-studio-like structure. She stages the main features using materials such as cardboard and paper, which she paints or onto which she affixes photographs. The life-sized truck involved in the accident occupies center stage. Motifs taken from everyday life complement the events accompanied by punch lines. A fly in the Poggenpohl kitchen or asseverations such as 'Forever and always' followed by 'Red eyes and snot' call up personal chains of associations. A retrospective of drawings and collages on A4 sheets of paper produced between 1999 and 2009 rounds off the installation. The incidents captured in these enchanting, small sketches are also examples of the tragicomedy common to all humankind: hopes, wishes, and life schemes are crushed under the weight of the circumstances. Bad decisions cause moments of happiness to turn into the opposite.
Birgit Brenner was born in Ulm. She lives and works in Berlin and Stuttgart, where she is a professor at the Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design. Monopol magazine celebrates her as one of the 'most radical contemporary artists' 'who does not restrict herself to one medium in the implementation of her artistic ideas.' The prominent Leipzig- and Berlin-based gallerist Judy Lybke, who was instrumental in establishing artists such as Matthias Weischer or Neo Rauch on the international art market, also represents Birgit Brenner. Lybke was recently able to achieve notable commercial success with the unconventional artist, for example at the Frieze Art Fair in New York.

The exhibition is being accompanied by a catalogue made possible by funding from the Kreissparkasse Tübingen. Edited by Daniel J. Schreiber, it includes texts by the artist, the editor, the SWR2 film critic Herbert Spaich, and the best-selling author Juli Zeh. Because it also features photographs of the exhibition, the catalogue will first be presented to the public on July 21 at 4:00 p.m. within the scope of a panel discussion with the artist, Herbert Spaich, and Daniel J. Schreiber
The exhibition by Birgit Brenner is being complemented by the presentation of a selection of portraits and landscape paintings by Georg Friedrich Zundel (1875-1948). Zundel became well known at the turn of the 20th century for his portrayals of workers. The artist, who stems from Iptingen, lived in Tübingen from 1927 onwards. His second wife Paula, daughter of the industrialist Robert Bosch, founded the Kunsthalle, opened in 1971, in his honor.


CATALOGUE
Birgit Brenner. Für immer und ewig / Forever and Always, edited by Daniel J. Schreiber, with texts by Birgit Brenner, Herbert Spaich, Juli Zeh and the editor, Hardcover, 128 pages, about 100 colored images


GUIDED TOURS
Saturdays at 3:00 p.m., Tuesdays at 5:30 p.m.
Fee per person: €2.50


SPECIAL EVENTS
Sunday, June 30, 2013, 4:00 p.m.
Guided tour with curator Daniel J. Schreiber

Sunday, July 21, 2013, 4:00 p.m.
Artist Talk with Birgit Brenner, Herbert Spaich and Daniel J. Schreiber
Panel discussion with the artist, the prominent film critic Herbert Spaich and the curator of the Kunsthalle Tübingen.