Vernissage:

Thursday, September 2, 2010 at 7 p.m.

Welcome address:

Frank Michael Zeidler, First Chairman of the Deutscher Künstlerbund

Gerhard Pfennig, Executive Board of VG Bild-Kunst and the Stiftung Kunstfonds

Opening:

Monika Grütters, Member of the German Bundestag, Chair of the Committee on Cultural and Media Affairs

Laudatio:

Gisela Kleinlein, artist

From September 3^rd to October 22, 2010, the Deutscher Künstlerbund (Association of German Artists) presents works by Jenny Michel, 2010 prizewinner of the »HAP-Grieshaber-Preis der VG Bild-Kunst,« awarded by the Stiftung Kunstfonds. 

In her work, Jenny Michel explores conventions and attitudes that have been handed down for generations, ones which oftentimes seem to represent the invisible framework of human existence. An important role is played in this context by science, whose findings and truth claims she critically interrogates. By sounding out and displacing the boundaries between imagination and empirically verified phenomena, the imagined is able to circulate as though it were real, thereby reshaping reality’s susceptibility to perception. In the project room of the Deutsche Künstlerbund, Jenny Michel investigates Paradise as an abstract place and a cultural palimpsest. 

»Paradise is the best of all prisons« Jorge Luis Borges 

Is Paradise a joyful place? Certainly, all of our efforts seem aimed at coming as close as possible to that mythical place. Paradise is a space of possibilities toward which our desires and yearnings are directed, yet it remains perpetually unattainable – perhaps of necessity. Still, it always resonates with a muted undercurrent of horror: that of eternal boredom. All too soon, and having barely set out in its direction, we begin to suffer from a surfeit of Paradise, to sicken of it. 

By embedding a personal archaeology in a scientific envelope, the »Paradise Palimpsest« presents itself as a »mine of coagulated images,« with its inextricably labyrinthine stratifications, where old and new converge, where obstructed and buried elements are exposed anew, where tensions and synergies form, perpetually generating the new. Layer by layer, they lie side-by-side and on top of one another, yet without obscuring one another.

Website Jenny Michel »

In January 2010, the jury of the Stiftung Kunstfonds awarded Berlin-based artist Jenny Michel with the »HAP-Grieshaber-Preis der VG Bild-Kunst,« which is endowed with €25,000, for outstanding artistic achievement.

The prize money for the »HAP-Grieshaber-Preis der VG Bild-Kunst« is made available by the VG Bild-Kunst from funds drawn from designated deductions from the distribution schemes for copyright fees paid to the VG Bild-Kunst.

The VG Bild-Kunst and the Stiftung Kunstfonds

in collaboration with the Deutscher Künstlerbund

Opening hours:

Tue – Fri, 2 p.m. – 6 p.m. and by appointment