Tag: Manuel Osterholt

Berlin Photo Week – DEAD END STREET

Dear friends from Berlin! Tomorrow we are going to open “Dead End Street” exhibition together with @manuelosterholt at the @hvw8gallery from 6pm, Linienstrasse 161

HVW8 Gallery Berlin and Berlin Photo Week are pleased to present DEAD END STREET, a double pop-up photography exhibition featuring Nikita Teryoshin and Manuel Osterholt.

With the work “I‘ve never been to Russia“, which began in 2019 and shows Russia going astray, Teryoshin deals with his homeland, which is gradually slipping into fascism. Whether religious parades or Victory Day in the pouring rain with slogans like “We could repeat it!“ on the red square, studios of propaganda tv shows or the notorious “Pavlov‘s dog“ under museum glass in St.Petersburg, which stands for classical conditioning, Teryoshin is always looking for suitable motifs that describe his feeling towards the zeitgeist. However, an always critical photo-documentary examination leads to a dead end on February 24th, 2022. Teryoshin posts a picture of a burning Russian passport under the caption “Not in my Name“ and decides not to return to his homeland for the time being in protest against the war.

Opening Friday Nov 1st – Manuel Osterholt (SUPERBLAST)

Superblast_2paintings

Exhibition Opening
Friday, 1st of November 2019
6:00pm – 10:00pm
HVW8 Berlin – Linienstraße 161, 10115 Berlin

In bursts of neon paint, Osterholt configures symbolic odes to our human condition and mortality. Through his use of vivid and unnatural colors, elements of nature, the celestial and the otherworldly are transfigured into warning signs, as if illuminated by the prophetic glow from an explosion elsewhere. Like a heatwave in fall, the paintings whisper age-old fables in the flicker of pink-orange candle light: an ancient cycle of birth and destruction binds humanity and the natural world. Osterholt also presents a series of ceramic masks which reference both the traditions of ancient ceremony and ritual, and hiding in plain sight. These themes are unified in the glow of a lightbox installation, which features in the show as a symbolic gesture towards the tension between light and dark.

While these works possess Osterholt’s signature iconography, the artist embraces a looser mode of expression than his usually-refined graphic style. Painterly strokes and sketchiness signal a renewed urgency in his message, as well as a playfulness which refracts remembered summers of his youth among the olive trees in Greece. The lucid mythologies encoded in the works also instigate a dialogue with the viewer about sacred tales of morality. Framed by the title’s impossible endeavour of ‘measuring the sky’, Osterholt’s work brings into question the role of the ego in the imbalance between good and evil. Through the mirroring of forms such as raindrops and flames, a microcosm emerges for the stardust from which we came, and that to which we’ll return.

Text by Brit Seaton