Maria und Natalia Petschatnikov – Gruppendynamik
20.01. – 22.04.2017
back to overviewMaria und Natalia Petschatnikov sind geniale Illusionistinnen. In der Tradition des Realismus des 19. Jahrhunderts malen und zeichnen sie Dinge und Situationen aus unserer alltäglichen Lebenswelt und bilden aus den verschiedensten Materialien dreidimensionale Objekte. All dies inszenieren sie in ihren Ausstellungen zu einer Gesamtinstallation, die die Unterscheidung von Malerei und Objekt durch zahlreiche Trompe l‘œil -Effekte verwischt.
Ihr Blick ist dabei vielfältig: Sie schauen auf ihr urbanes Umfeld, greifen soziale Themen auf, lassen ihren Blick auf Reisen schweifen – tatsächlichen wie fiktionalen. Sie schauen auf die (Kunst)-Geschichte, verbinden Gegenwart und Vergangenheit, innere und äußere Welt, Fiktion und Wirklichkeit.
Das Künstlerduo stellt häufig ganz alltägliche Gegenstände dar, die wie Artefakte in neue Zusammenhänge gebettet werden. Dies geschieht teils werkimmanent, teils erst durch die installative Anordnung, in der die Gegenstände mit anderen verknüpft werden. Diese Beziehungsstiftungen eröffnen dem Betrachter neue Erkenntnisse und bilden in sich ein Gesamtkunstwerk.
Für die Stern-Wywiol Galerie haben die beiden Künstlerinnen ein Ausstellungskonzept entwickelt, das das Umfeld der Galerie in einem Business-Distrikt aufgreift. In den Galerieräumen werden die Zwillingsschwestern ein Art Morph zwischen Kunst- und Bürowelt schaffen und einen surrealen Kontor-Raum kreieren. Aus gewöhnlichen Büro-Motiven wird ein ungewöhnlicher Ort, der den Betrachter zu außergewöhnlichen Assoziationen inspiriert. Ihre standortspezifische Intervention knüpft dabei an die dadaistische Tradition von Marcel Duchamp an und führt den Diskurs des White Cubes auf eine einzigartige Art fort.
Maria and Natalia Petschatnikov are brilliant illusionists. In the tradition of 19th-century Realism, they paint and draw things and situations from the world of our everyday lives and form three-dimensional objects out of the most diverse materials. In their exhibitions, they combine all of this to stage collective installations that blur the distinction between paintings and objects, by means of numerous trompe l’ œil effects.
In doing so, their views are diverse: They look at their urban surroundings, take up social topics and let their gaze wander on journeys – real and fictive. They look at (art) history, link the past and present, the inner and outside world, fiction and reality.
The artist duo often depicts entirely ordinary objects, which are embedded in new contexts like artifacts. This effect is partly immanent to the works themselves and partly due to their arrangement within an installation in which the objects are mutually interlinked. The relationships established in this way reveal new insights to viewers and form a Gesamtkunstwerk in themselves.
For the Stern-Wywiol Galerie, the two artists have developed an exhibition concept that takes up the gallery’s surroundings within a business district. The twin sisters will generate a kind of morph between the world of art and the world of the office in the gallery’s rooms and create a surreal office space. Ordinary office motifs form a place that is not ordinary and inspires extraordinary associations among viewers. At the same time, their site-specific intervention draws on the Dadaistic tradition of Marcel Duchamp and also elaborates upon the discourse regarding the White Cube in a unique way.
Thinking the unthinkable
Introductory thoughts by Prof. Heinz Lohmann
on the opening of the exhibition "Group Dynamics" by Maria and Natalia Petschatnikov
at the STERNWYWIOL GALERIE in Hamburg, 20 January to 22 April 2017.
Recently I got to know "Dr Watson". Patients can describe their symptoms to him and he then tells them the diagnosis. He even says what percentage he is sure of in his assessment - let's say 78 percent. Then he names further examinations and analyses that are still necessary to finally specify the diagnosis - perhaps taking an X-ray and determining one or two laboratory values. "Dr. Watson" is an intelligent software. It can process about 12,000 specialist publications a day. It reads, evaluates, compares the results with other information and finally applies its knowledge. "Dr. Watson" can analyse therapy processes millions of times over and use them to suggest and implement an individualised and optimised therapy. It can support digital workflows and thus make the work of doctors and nurses easier. In addition, it can of course communicate with robots such as "Pepper" and "Nao" and control their use.
Digitalisation is not only revolutionising medicine, but our entire lives. And we are only at the very beginning. The economy in particular is radically affected by the changes. Our previously so clear images of the worlds of work are beginning to blur. We are getting into unclear circumstances. And this is exactly where the artists Maria and Natalia Petschatnikov start with the exhibition "Group Dynamics". In their installation, they link the art world of the gallery on the ground floor of the commercial building with the world of the offices on the floors above. There is an abundance of drawings, paintings and objects. We discover, for example, money, extremely aesthetically represented, and cash receipts or envelopes and workbooks. The yellow post-its are stuck everywhere. We also identify the typical attributes of business, the "uniform" of the managers, for example: five shirts, five pairs of shoes, one for each working day of the week, meticulously painted. For Maria and Natalia Petschatnikov, however, business life is a completely foreign event. They have therefore built small "disturbances" into their arrangements. In one of the shirt-shoe combinations, a painting with two pairs of shoes suddenly appears. The painting with one pair of shoes, which actually belongs here, is "hidden" in another part of the gallery.
Maria and Natalia Petschatnikov place their art staff in this formed business world. The space is populated by dogs and birds. The dogs were photographed on Berlin streets, then painted and modelled into sculptures on a scale of 1:1. The life-size birds represent the three most common specimens in cities, namely crows, pigeons and sparrows. To avoid any misunderstanding, the artists are not concerned here with animal love or rural idylls, but with the urban contexts of their works. The invisible animal owner at the end of the leash is significant for understanding the works.
The artists' world is the urban environment; this is also reflected in their lives. Born in 1973 in Leningrad / St. Petersburg, they attended the children's painting school of the Hermitage. At the age of 12 they were already able to achieve exciting results in their work. They did not receive a classical Russian realist education in their home city. Rather, they studied art at Hunter College in New York and at the École des Baux-Arts in Paris. There they also worked in the studio of the master of assemblages, Annette Messager. This station was formative for the two artists, as a look at their previous work shows. Afterwards, they lived in Hamburg for a few years and are now at home in Berlin, when they are not travelling the world again. Their themes represent urbanity, urban space with its rich facets of culture, leisure and work: underground trains, museums, flea markets, computers and today, here, the Kontore.
The "photo wallpapers" on the walls of the gallery reproduce views of the offices from the floors above. Maria and Natalia Petschatnikov took the photos after closing time. Then they let their "exotics", for example small toy figures, Brussels sprouts and tomatoes or their birds and dogs, wander into the workrooms and onto the desks. The images created here were further generalised and alienated in the computer. In doing so, the artists take recourse to the art history of the 15th and 16th centuries. At that time, exotic fruits in still lifes embodied their own special symbolism. With these interventions in real space, Maria and Natalia Petschatnikov today abruptly juxtapose initially unconnected realities. This irritates the viewer. But that is precisely the aim. In this way, the two artists draw us into an examination of their themes. This happens very often in their work. They enter into a dialogue with the viewer. The viewer must first complete their art in his or her mind. In our collection, for example, there is a blurred photo that is perceived as a family picture. In reality, however, it is of indistinctly photographed linen bags of various sizes and colours, taken hanging by thin threads from a pole. We all know the blurred and yellowed analogue photographs in the old family albums with the only indistinctly perceivable friends and relatives. These images are stored in our memory and therefore we fall back on old experiences when perceiving such motifs. This principle also applies to the depiction of animals, which often lack eyes, nose or mouth. The two artists are not concerned with the likeness. This even applies to their realistic paintings. Maria and Natalia Petschatnikov's artistic objects are always embedded in their surroundings. What they do is conceptual art, but not in a minimalist form, but extremely expressive. The result is often disturbing for the viewer. "The function of art is to make reality impossible" the playwright Heiner Müller once so aptly remarked.
We live in a time of disruptive developments. We have to say goodbye to the familiar. Algorithms are taking over many tasks previously reserved for humans. In the future, "Dr. Watson" will know and be able to do almost everything better than we can. And what will be left for us then? The art of Maria and Natalia Petschatnikov shows it quite clearly. It is to think the truly unthinkable. It is true that there is the first "digital Rembrandt", a great picture that software has "painted" in the computer from the analysis of all known Rembrandt pictures. But artificial intelligence only processes what it has experienced. In business, it has always been a matter of breaking away from the conventional, of allowing what at first seems crazy, of having the courage to dare the unfamiliar. The art of Maria and Natalia Petschatnikov can encourage this and thus set a dynamic in motion that sweeps along with its creativity. That is why the exhibition "Group Dynamics" fits so wonderfully into this Kontorhaus.