Vague Characters

Watersheds

Galerie Karin Guenther presents Christiane Blattmann’s first solo exhibition in Hamburg. Her artistic ap- proach is shaped by her experience in theatre, painting, architecture and sculpture and is reflected in plastic and spatial questions. She thinks of space as both an abstract and a concrete dimension, the divi- sion of which produces not only forms but also boundaries and thus concepts of inside and outside. The positions of bodies in space can be decisive for architectural, but also psychosocial and political perspec-tives. In addition to space as a conceptual ‘material’, it is haptic materials that enable Blattmann to link architecture, sculpture and painting.

In the exhibition, she draws on industrial modular systems of rain pipes. The infrastructures of the drain- pipes serve to draw a boundary between the dry interior of a dwelling and the damp elements outside its walls. In the exhibition, the drainage and network of industrial pipe systems not only approach the physical metabolism, but also the social body, which reaches out to and beyond the city. The zinc pipes are extended by objects sewn from deconstructed patterns of hoodies, which are painted like a canvas to counteract the shiny, metallic coldness of industrial modular systems.

Literally like a footnote, a fragmented thermoplastic mould of work shoes refers to a maquette for an urban extension in Ratingen-West near Düsseldorf by the architect Merete Mattern, who died in 2007. It was celebrated as the only innovative competition entry that took the demand for a new ecological urban vision seriously. At the same time, however, architecture critic Anna Teut exposed the competition itself as a fraud. While renowned architects were developing their designs, workers were already digging the sew- ers for the new district according to a generic design that organised the neighbourhood around a shop- ping centre, strathegically located next to a motorway for easy access.

Supported by UHASSELT