SMALL – An Exploration of Miniature
Event Type:
Group Exhibition
Location:
Sexauer Gallery, Streustraße 90, 13086 Berlin, Germany
Date:
January 21, 2017 - February 11, 2017
Time:
Tuesday – Saturday, 13:00 – 18:00
Opening: January 20, 18:00 - 21:00
Artists:
Jorinde Voigt, Thomas Zipp, Erik Schmidt, Michael Sailstorfer, Tjorg Douglas Beer, Dirk Bell, Julius von Bismarck, Fritz Bornstück, Carla Chan, Su Hwan Choi, Jeff Cowen, Zuzanna Czebatul, Björn Dahlem, Roger Eberhard, Martin Eder, Janine Eggert & Philipp Ricklefs, Yassir Ali Eldalaty, Lorenz Estermann, Ornella Fieres, Pius Fox, Jay Gard, Andreas Golder, Amélie Grözinger, Philip Grözinger, Gregor Hildebrandt, John Isaacs, Jeffrey James, Michelle Jezierski, Klaus Jörres, Markus Keibel, Felix Kiessling, Caroline Kryzecki, Lindsay Lawson, Florian Meisenberg, Bjørn Melhus, Toshihiko Mitsuya, Przemek Pyszczek, Anselm Reyle, Peter Rösel, Pola Sieverding, Katja Strunz, Philip Topolovac, Iris Touliatou, Ulrich Urban, Elmar Vestner, Anna Vogel.
Miniature is a matter of perspective. When you look at the small it is not about centimeters but about relations, references, and a special way of seeing.
Miniatures can be representatives. Since the Middle Ages, people carried their beloved ones as close to the body as possible, in the form of painted mini portraits or amulets. In the case of Madame Pompadour, this quite incidentally revealed oneself as the king's mistress. Miniatures can be models, pulling a distant thing close or making something incomprehensible visible.
The small forces us to take a close look. The miniature is an experimental space and a projecting surface. It creates a sensual tension between recognition and alienation. In his Poetics of Space from 1957, Gaston Bachelard called miniatures „happy spaces“ – soap bubbles in which the world is a handy reflection. But even though we often refer the small to the good and contemplative, the miniature is not a purely utopian space after all. Over the past decades, it was especially the art which has repeatedly been infiltrated by horror. Reduction enables images which cannot be shown on a large scale.
In the exhibition SMALL, more than forty artists will be showing their perspective on the miniature through forms of reduction, compression or references in different media from painting to video. The artist Jay Gard will design the exhibition architecture.