JÖRG BAIER
CATALINA PABÓN
CHRISTIAN SCHMUCK
JUDITH SCHWINN

"THINGS SHOULD START
TO GET INTERESTING
RIGHT ABOUT NOW"

Opening: Friday, 24 October, 2008, 7pm
Duration: 25 October through 20 December, 2008

In the exhibition "Things Should Start to Get Interesting Right About Now" KUTTNER SIEBERT presents works on paper by four artists. As unique as their stylistic signature and international orientation might be, each artist’s work not only uses the same support, but also refers to other positions in one way or another. On a thematic level, this is clearly evident in the engagement with the issue of landscape and nature in the work of Christian Schmuck and Catalina Pabón, and on a hermeneutic level in the complexity of the visual language of Jörg Baier or Judith Schwinn. The exhibition is the first exhibit of each these artists at KUTTNER SIEBERT.
The drawings and objects of Judith Schwinn are extremely fragile. The almost seismographic feel of the drawings betrays a quite concentrated and cautious approach to the motif that slowly takes shape. The hand at work seems to want to embody the hardly perceptible restiveness of inner emotion in legible forms. In contrast to this, the work on the objects is goal oriented from the very start, ultimately because their figure depends on the choice of usually found materials, and hence only partially subject to controllable influences. And yet there is a clear commonality between these two modes of expression in terms of both their fragility and their content. The visual language in both cases attests to a personal view of things, and remains mysterious and hidden to the beholder.
Similarly complex is the cosmos that Jörg Baier creates in his drawings and collages. His vocabulary of forms and structures follows a logic all its own that is almost impossible to decode. Even if the original source of some details from the reproduction of known art works remains visible, it is now transformed in a context that has nothing at all to do with these origins. Instead, they combine to form extremely dense compositions of an almost object-like character. In so doing, clarity is largely avoided; instead the importance of autonomous art works and the links between the work and beholder, art and its frame of reception are explored.
Christian Schmuck describes his use of nature as a model in his work as a path to awareness. This awareness is fed by all the senses, considering the fact that he works exclusively on site and with the greatest possible effort. Notable here is not only his recourse to the techniques of the old masters like engraving, etching, or aquatint. Christian Schmuck creates a detailed image of nature as it reveals itself to him in the moment of its beholding. The concept here is not limited to a romantic notion of nature, but also includes its gradual decay and its points of connection with civilization.
The landscape in the watercolors of Catalina Pabón presents itself as dark and mysterious. It thus remains vague in its appearance, impossible to define precisely. Sometimes the contours are so restrained, or the form becomes so lost in an overall darkness that the shape gradually begins to dissolve and the impression of abstraction gains the upper hand. Decisive here is less the recourse to the concrete form of a motif, as the communication of an associative and emotional subjective mood in her pictures.

Jörg Baier, born in 1975 in Darmstadt, studied art in Munich and Karlsruhe from 1996 to 2002, in 2003 studying with Erwin Gross (Meisterschüler); he lives and works in Karlsruhe.
Catalina Pabón, born in 1979, studied from 1998–2002 at Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano in Bogotá, and from 2002–2005 at Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Braunschweig with John Armleder. She now lives and works in Berlin.
Christian Schmuck, born in 1981 in Ulm-Söflingen, studied from 2002–2008 at Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Karlsruhe. In 2008 studying with Erwin Gross (Meisterschüler). The artist lives and works in Karlsruhe.
Judith Schwinn, born in 1976, attended Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Karlsruhe from 1998 to 2004, in 2004 studying with Helmut Dorner (Meisterschüler); she lives and works in Berlin.