Out of Touch

March 1 - 25, 2018

Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin

Text by Carina Bukuts

Reaching out for something to hold Looking for a love Where the climate is cold Manic moves and drowsy dreams Or living in the middle Between the two extremes Smoking guns hot to the touch Would cool down If we didn’t use them so much We’re soul alone And soul really matters to me Too much You’re out of touch I’m out of time. (Daryl Hall & John Oates) 

The slash is used as a punctuation mark to express relationships and circumstances. According to Roland Barthes the slash has the unique characteristic of being able to point out similarities as well as differences. The double exhibition Out of Touch / Out of Time by Aneta Kajzer and Manuel Stehli deals with the significance of this semiotics in a special way. Two positions in painting come together postulating an affinity in their very distinctions from one another. In Out of Touch / Out of Time, in search of an unambiguous statement from the works the viewer is confronted by his own attitude of expectation. Ultimately, it is precisely this ambiguous legibility of the paintings that unites the two artistic positions despite their formal differences. The slash in the title can thus be read as a connecting or separating element. At first glance, it initially separates Aneta Kajzer’s exhibition Out of Touch from Manuel Stehli’s exhibition Out of Time. But what happens if the slash is interpreted in the opposite way? Then Out of Touch / Out of Time is a sum of two solo exhibitions, which invites to make commonalities as well as differences visible and thus negotiates the situation of the tête-à-tête of two artistic positions as such. To support this idea, the artists worked with the diagonal of the two different rooms and interpreted it as an imaginary slash.  

Aneta Kajzer: Out of Touch 

The pointe technique belongs to a ballet dancer like her tutu and expresses elegance, grace and fragility. In the painting Ballerina (2017) by Aneta Kajzer, however, the pointe shoes depicted seem to fall from this traditional idea. The feet which wear them are not small and fragile but bulging and are stretched almost over the entire canvas. Instead of effortless tippling it seems to be a powerful stamping. A movement of protest and rejection. Against the conservative image of women which was generated by the figure of the ballerina and in particular by the pointe technique of the 19th century. Aneta Kajzer manages to touch themes in her pictures that you think you have understood in first place. But her pictorial world changes between humor and seriousness. The figures that Aneta Kajzer paints elude normativity. They have deformed limbs, funny-looking faces and are oversized. They move on the threshold between ugliness and humor and rise questions about sexuality, gender and ideals of beauty. The paintings from Aneta Kajzer tell a story from abstraction to figuration. On large-format canvases, the artist experiments with contrast-rich color settings and develops her motifs in an intuitive process by applying layers of color for layers of color, mixing them together and possibly scratching them down again. This technique leads to the fact that traces of previous movements and previously used colors become clear in her pictures and set accents in the overall composition.

The exhibition is part of the Winsor & Newton painting scholarship.