LUXURIA Themed Competition 2018

GALERIE STØRPUNKT 19. Januar bis 23. Februar 2017, München

On January 18, the exhibition LUXURIA started with a well-attended vernissage evening in Maxvorstadt with Stephan Stumpf. A publicly announced, artistic reappraisal of the wonderful theme WOLLUST (lust) - one of the seven deadly sins of mankind. It felt like hundreds of submissions were received and the gallery posted them on the Themed Competition facebook page for anyone who was interested even during the application period. Naturally this increased the suspense to see which ten would be the chosen ones that would finally find their way into the gallery. I would like to introduce my personal favorites to you briefly now:

„My mom always told me I could make gold out of shit but diamonds are a girl’s best friend“ Anna Baranowski

With this piece, a stele made from wenge wood (also known as African rosewood) with a diamond inside, artist Anna Baranowski proves to us that today we actually can transform sh… into anything.

Using a considerable amount of time and effort to produce the sparkling stone of female desires, she proves that every woman would actually hang excrement around her neck if it came in this form. Although I was already familiar with the possibility of wearing one's loved ones as a piece of jewelry instead of having them cremated, I found the installation to be very refreshing on this evening and also very successful in providing food for thought on the exhibition theme. When I look at the miniature diamond itself, it looks big, noble, perfectly cut and sparkling – something made possible by the magnifying glass in the stele – some confusing questions are running through my mind:

Is it a mortal sin to turn a loved one into a diamond?

Is it a sin of humanity in general to give so much power over our lives to the need and desire to possess luxury?

Does this still hold true if the material used is only excrement?

Does it demonstrate the senseless desire for luxury and thus society’s insanity of attaching the value of life to the possession of status symbols – such as diamonds?

Doesn't the fact that this piece of jewelry, so highly-valued in our eyes,– made of carbon condensed over millions of years – can even be produced from the waste of any living being demonstrate mankind’s crazy obsession? Is it not senseless to artificially attach such value to something that is apparently rare and difficult to obtain?

I think I'll just leave my thoughts here, like Anna left her stele in the gallery room.

For me Baranowski's artwork is the key piece of this exhibition!

Another absolute highlight of the exhibition is the 4-hour performance video "Betthupferl" (Bedtime Sweet) by the artist Linnéa Schwarz – shown in the lead picture of the article.

Only after a closer look at it does the viewer realize the person asleep in the alleged lightbox image is actually breathing. The performance begins with a young woman lying down to sleep with a huge, flawless chocolate bunny. Over the course of 4 hours it melts in her arm and becomes more and more unsightly! Take the time to look! On the artist’s website we can see pictures of the video, which show in snapshots how the image of the woman with the rabbit changes over the course of 4 hours!

In a live performance at the opening evening, Linnéa Schwarz cut a string of pearls and swallowed the individual pearls with water. In my later research on the Internet I found the anecdote of Cleopatra, who drank a pearl to redeem a bet with her Roman lover Marcus Antonius – to whom she then boasted of being able to eat ten million sestertii in just one meal. To consume something so precious and to merge it with your own body so is probably a very special way of committing a mortal sin in the form of decadence. Linnéa Schwarz told me afterwards, however, that her main concern was the absurdity that turns a seemingly normal situation into a surreal moment. Photos of this performance TONIGHT I ATE MY NECKLACE can also be seen on her website.

Monika Supé shows us the most sensual approach to the motto. Her voluptuously overloaded bodies of crocheted wire mesh – in part with multiple breasts and legs – show the confrontation with well-proportioned femininity in sculpture and painting.

I find the wall objects of the artist collective Eyrich von Motz, consisting of the two artists Phillip Eyrich & Mateusz von Motz, particularly successful as artistic sculptures, even though the reference to the exhibition’s theme is not particularly clear to me. Nevertheless, one of them would probably be the winner if I could choose something from this exhibition for my own art collection!
A visitor to the vernissage winked at me that she would like to buy the "rusty fur" as a symbol of women’s desire, who now again yearn for pubic hair - this would have a lot to do with lust, but is probably not the artists' intent.

My personal conclusion on the exhibition: It was less sensual than I had expected, but nevertheless an interesting, inviting exhibition.

Even if it dealt very sparingly with the one sin that everyone had expected to see more of, namely lust itself. Perhaps, however, the curators also wanted to intentionally thwart the audience’s expectations and teach us not to deal with it lust so superficially. The theme of the exhibition is anything but apparent.
In any case, however, the Galerie Störpunkt achieves one thing: just like the exhibitions "RUSH" by Lena Polizka and "ANYTHING BUT DECORATIVE" with Emilie Steele, which I will never forget, it won’t be forgotten so quickly. And it motivates us to give the subject further thought.
Störpunkt continues to fulfill what the name promises; it disturbs (German: stören) our biased ideas and views, stimulates us to think and thus remains in our minds. To create a special experience and engagement with art is, in my opinion, exactly the intention that the owner of the Galerie Stephan Stumpf is pursuing.

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