Opening Invitation: Burkhard Held + Raphaël Denis

Burkhard Held. Fatal Beauty 

Fatal Beauty is the motto of the current exhibition by Berlin artist Burkhard Held. A title that reminds of a dramatic film or a thriller when you hear it for the first time. In what way can beauty be fatal? Who or what disastrous incident has happened to the beautiful woman in the painting? Before the inner eye of the beholder, possible scenarios are played out and he begins to envision his own story.

Burkhard Held describes himself as a great cinephile. Even before he discovered painting as the medium of his art, he had dealt with films and their motifs. Naturally, has also been dealing painterly with this topic since 2013. His acrylics painted in transverse format remind of a filmstrip. Like a still image, he selects a snapshot to depict that in his painting. Through his color selection and the structured application of paint, Held creates the unique mood in his works. For him, every human being has their own image memory, filled with a variety of scenes and images from the movie world. They are personal memories that are retrieved when viewing the artworks. In his works, he directs our attention to details that are otherwise below our perceptive capacity, and for a moment he seems to succeed in stopping time.

Burkhard Held was born in Berlin in 1953 and has been a professor at the Universität der Künste Berlin since 1993.

Raphael Denis. Endless Collapse II 

The main theme in the work of French artist Raphaël Denis is his reworking of the events of the Second World War and its history. His primary motif is our non-oblivion of art objects destroyed during WWII through the National Socialists.

Part of his concept are various installations in the shape of heavy bunkers, symbolizing a certain stability and order. The bunker represents an element of opposing contrasts. On the one hand, it symbolizes protection and stability, on the other hand loneliness and intimidation.

These sculptural works are paired with a video installation that reproduces the sound of a metronome as its background.

The constant repetition of these tones is intended to show the hustle and bustle of the time and thus strengthen the seriousness in his oeuvre.

With his installation 'Vernichtet’ (Destroyed) for which Denis uses old frames, his subject is also taken up to commemorate the incineration of numerous ‘degenerate' works of art.

His heavy materials such as concrete also point to the confrontation with historical content in his work.

The overall appearance of these conceptual works is characterized by its very sober note, which is underlined by the black and white work.

For the Parisian, born in 1979, this is his first exhibition in Berlin.

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