LAYER BY LAYER: PINK?
Doris Hansen (Short Residency), Kathrin Lorenz, Erwin Schwentner
Curator: Irmi Horn
Finissage as a special guided tour with late morning brooding about art objects and their height and depth with the artist Erwin Schwentner at the end of the exhibition SCHICHT UM SCHICHT: ROSAROT?
In fact, pink – “the little red” – was a male color for a long time. Until 1920, pink was considered a miniature edition of the red color of the rulers as a sign of masculinity and strength, which was used for men and boys. Girls, on the other hand, were dressed in sky blue. It was only after the First World War that this perception changed. At that time, the focus was on the reconstruction of the cities, and boys were dressed in practical colors of the “working world”. By the way, the classic Blaumann dates from this time and is the male counterpart to the later Rosa for girls.
The hue is also used in the sense of “optimistic, pleasing, positive”; this interpretation goes back to “rosy” or “pink red”. Phrases with this meaning are “experience rosy times” or “he is not exactly rosy” or “see the future in a rosy light”. A negative increase in this meaning in the sense of “unrealistic, transfiguring” are the expressions “see everything through rose-colored glasses” or “for them the world is pink”.
Registration requested until the evening before under: 0316262787 or kunstGarten@mur.ar
The swaying of the viewer – Doris Hansen’s microworlds
Microworlds form the meta-idea of all concepts and realizations of the Berlin-based artist Doris Hansen. They give them a shape in the form of installation, relief, object or as a drawing; they are extraterrestrial visions of our future.
The realizations consist of materials that are as foreign as possible, such as Styrofoam, which is invisibly hidden by synthetic textiles like a room skeleton. In recent years, the artist has expanded the microworlds with scans of her pencil drawings, which she colors digitally, as well as large-format reliefs. In the current projects, Doris Hansen combines her typical soft materials, which have a strong feel, with optical components: she is increasingly experimenting with LED lights that spread changing artificial light, or with worlds that are built in a plexiglass shell and appear like hemispheres in miniature. Especially the transparency of these object membranes or that of the shop windows, in which Doris Hansen regularly exhibits her installations, emphasize the difference between this other room and ours. The view of the viewer through these membranes fits only too well with the idea of a space that will never fully open up to us, because it escapes our imagination and leads us back to the concrete materiality of the works.
Doris Hansen draws inspiration from microbiology, from medieval worldviews and above all from comics and science fiction of the 1950s to the 1970s. This is how the microworlds also read as fictional worlds: We share the view of Flash Gordon or Barbarella, who was directed at the now many decades ago and over whose visions we can smile today, because everything turned out so differently. However, they are also – and perhaps above all – perfect worlds that do not want to reveal their manual manufacturing process, even disguise them, as if they were not manufactured in elaborate manual work, but themselves industrially and mechanically.
Doris Hansen creates multicolored, attractive, queer worlds, in which she brings about a deconstruction of the binary sexes via material and production technology: The building material Styropor attributed to masculinity is literally superimposed by feminine colors, textiles and floral motifs, the ideas of male/female, homo/hetero are deconstructed as cultural and historical assignments: tertium datur. In the microworlds the inhabitants of FIMO have no gender.
At the level of the signs, the microworlds are contradictory to receive. So the viewer feels attracted by their incredible material presence, but at the same time his thoughts collide again and again with the utopias to which the microworlds refer. There is an uncertain balance that, the longer we expose ourselves to the worlds, it falters and triggers discomfort in us despite – or precisely because of – the enormous aesthetics of the artificial. Because what do these worlds refer to? They always refer back to us and show us an empty place of our imagination, our future. Sarah Niesel (art historian)
Doris Hansen comes from Bad Oldesloe /Schleswig Holstein (1972). From 1992 to 2001 she studied German philology and art history in Trier and Berlin and completed her studies as Magistra Artium in 2001.
2001-2003 she was club operator and event manager (GLAM, Invalidenstrasse and Schillingstrasse), since 2003 she lives as a freelance artist in Berlin.
Kathrin Lorenz – Paintings
Kathrin Lorenz was born in Fürstenfeld, Styria, studied Fine Arts and Painting: 1999 University of Arts Allentown, Pennsylvania, USA, 1999 University of Applied Arts Vienna, Prof. Christian Ludwig Attersee
In 2005 she graduated with distinction. From then on, numerous exhibitions followed. From 1999 to 2016 she lived and worked as a freelance artist in Vienna. In 2017, Kathrin Siegl became Kathrin Lorenz. Since 2016 she has been living and working as a freelance artist in Styria, Am Hohenberg, Schöckl and is the mother of two daughters.
Their stays abroad led them to Iceland, New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Dublin, Amsterdam, Hamburg, Stockholm, Prague, Debrecen, Umbria, Pennsylvania, Belgium, Croatia, Slovenia, southern France, Tuscany and Switzerland (Geneva, Bern). She combines knowledge and imagination in her work and wants to change the viewing angle and create the possibility of new approaches in her typical lavious use of color and brush stroke for viewers.
Flamingos have impressed her for years. When flamingos hatch, they have a gray fluff. It takes years for her plumage to stain. Only at a more mature age do they become pink or pink. And the reason for this is their food. The menu of wild flamingos includes algae of the genus Dunaliella and small crabs. Some, like the others, contain very specific color pigments: carotenoids.
Certain microbes that color water red because they are rich in carotenoids, such as the “salt bacterium”, scientifically called Halobacterium salinarum, is at the beginning of the food chain. The small crabs feed on the tiny organisms that are at home in a highly salty environment, which are then eaten by the flamingos. Flamingoes can live to be 20 to 30 years old in the wild, and over 80 years in the zoo with careful care. In some parts of the world, flamingos were used until the 20th century for their flesh. Their pink shimmering feathers, however, were never coveted. The reason? They lose their color after plucking.
Erwin Schwentner – Sculptures
With his sculpture, Erwin Schwentner tries to comment on the so-called great themes of humanity and uses his own sculptural world, which means – always coming from his head – the “whole world”. Apart from this world there is none for him, so the attempts at explanation necessarily remain imperfect. Layer by layer, he uncovers human behavior in a humorous and critical way.
Schwentner was born in 1945 in Hitzendorf near Graz, he is married, has 3 children, was a judge, and has been active in artistic activity since 1980.
Since 1982 exhibitions and exhibition participations in Germany and abroad.
“Layer by Layer: Pink?” invites viewers to consider pink not as a mere color, but as a shifting symbol—gendered, politicized, aesthetic, biological. From flamingos to feminism, from neon textiles to handcrafted protests, pink emerges as a field of negotiation between the past and the future, between personal identity and collective imagination.