Isestraße 125, 20149 Hamburg
office@klosterfeldeedition.de

Hanne Darboven and Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt belong to a generation of conceptual artists who worked in two different political systems: Darboven in the Federal Republic of Germany and Wolf-Rehfeldt in the GDR.
They worked systematically, playing through structural variations, numerical sequences and series. With pen (Darboven) and typewriter (Wolf-Rehfeldt), they created notations consisting of lines, letters and numbers.
Darboven’s works give shape to time and document periods, usually spanning years, in multimedia installations. In her ‘typewritings,’ Wolf-Rehfeldt combines letters and numbers on paper to create playful language images that move between concrete poetry, drawing and graphics.

Both are isolated and connected figures. After her stay in New York, Darboven returned to Hamburg and lived in her parental villa, which she never left again during her lifetime. Successful at a young age, she participated in the most important international art exhibitions of the West.
Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt, constrained by the restrictive policies of the GDR, had no possibility to travel or exhibit. She became part of the international Mail-Art Movement, sending her works out into the world. Success came to her in later years: in 2012, she had her first solo exhibition in Germany.

Their artistic practice is writing. Unlike Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt’s, Darboven’s ‘“script”’ knows neither words nor letters. Methodically adapted to the law of time, her calendars carry out the ever same: each month begins with 1 and ends with 30 or 31. Darboven’s script is impersonal; she herself spoke of writing without describing.
Ruth Wolf Rehfeldt’s writing creates images from letters, numbers and punctuation marks. Like many works of concrete poetry, they build a semantic bridge to connect form with content. Often, the graphic itself becomes part of the meaning.

Both artists address political themes in their work: Wolf-Rehfeldt repeatedly focuses on environmental destruction, while Darboven’s work increasingly develops into a commemorative exploration of politics, history and intellectual history.
In Darboven’s work, critical engagement is central, and post-war conceptual art was received in the West at that time – and still is today – as a critique of art as a commodity.
Ruth Wolf Rehfeldt’s art was also a resistive response to the political conditions in the GDR. This showed when she stopped working after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Why send works out into the world when one can now travel?
Both belong to the same generation, yet developed their artistic practice in different political systems, as a response to and in dialogue with their times.

The exhibition features installations by Hanne Darboven, as well as works by Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt, including her well-known ‘typewritings’ and paintings.

The works of Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt are kindly provided by ChertLüdde, Berlin.

Copyright: the artists, Courtesy: Klosterfelde Edition & ChertLuedde

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With
Donald Baechler · John Bock · Klaus vom Bruch · Werner Büttner · Hanne Darboven · Lena Henke · Carsten Höller · General Idea · Christian Jankowski · Felix Kiessling · Jonas Lipps · Axel Loytvedt · Matt Mullican · Henrik Olesen · Yuri Pattison · Dan Peterman · Kay Rosen · Rirkrit Tiravanija · Rosemarie Trockel · Jorinde Voigt and Lawrence Weiner
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Through September 2025
By Appointment Only

Isestraße 125, 20149 Hamburg
office@klosterfeldeedition.de

The exhibition features a selection of editions dating back to the 1990s, focusing on the artistic approach to the edition as a medium – an art form that broadens access to art and, one that has been at the heart of the Klosterfelde Edition programme since it’s founding by Helga Maria Klosterfelde in 1989. Alongside these, the exhibition will present works by John Bock from the Klosterfelde Collection.
The German artist is known for his multimedia works, where everyday materials and language are transformed into intricate, often grotesquely theatrical scenarios. His expansive installations frequently double as settings for his films, performances and lectures. Bock’s practice combines drawings, sculptures, performances, film sets and videos, into unified, layered works.
The exhibition highlights artists, who often have longstanding collaboration with Klosterfelde Edition, offering insight into their conceptual development as well as shifts in approaches to the edition as a medium. This becomes clear in the work of John Bock, who has been involved with the Klosterfelde Edition since its inception and recently released a new edition. His work demonstrates how artistic strategies within the medium have changed over time.
By presenting Bock’s works from the collection alongside the editions from Klosterfelde Edition, the exhibition shows different artistic approaches that navigate the space between the unique and the reproduced.
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Images
Copyright: the artists, Courtesy: Klosterfelde Edition, Photos: Fred Dott

 
February 17 to April 6, 2024

The impossibility of an island.
Or: Even if everything is drowning, everything must continue to flow.

The Landwehr Canal has burst its banks and the river water is flooding Potsdamer Strasse. At Klosterfelde we stand ankle-deep in it. Container ships work tirelessly here, transporting materials from A to B. It doesn’t matter where A is, B is irrelevant, and movement is the main thing. The material that the ships usually carry has already become part of them; their hulls are no longer smooth metal, but roughly constructed of rubble and concrete. Does the suggested coastline still serve to hold on to? No, the coast is no longer a destination, only the illusion of a terrestrial sphere that is shrinking into small islands as the sea level rises. The barges behind the coastline no longer navigate on rivers, but on complicated canal systems towards the sluice. The steel structures, with their reflective routes, carry fragments of sunken civilisations on their posts.
We see only one part of a planetary infrastructure that spans the globe. This much is clear: it takes an enormous amount of material to overcome the resistance of distance and height to keep the system of global transport in motion. And there is more in the Berlin water landscape near Klosterfelde, where we stand with wet shoes: A platform full of neatly sorted, colourful rubble. Could this have been an oil platform? This is a vivid illustration of the shift from material to overburden and back to material.
All the colourful dust is neatly piled up, dumped, sorted, reassembled, and shipped off to be navigated in the ever-rising seas. The island is no longer an option, it is a temporary storage facility for a world in constant flux. And even if everything is drowning, everything must continue to flow. Welcome to Marta Dyachenko’s Association for Transformative Navigability (ATNA).

Ludwig Engel

All Images: copyright Marta Dyachenko, courtesy Klosterfelde Edition, photos by Marjorie Brunet Plaza

With Hanne Darboven, Lara Favaretto and Matt Mullican

An exhibition in two parts, in collaboration with ChertLüdde
October 28, 2023 to January 27, 2024

In the 1960s, Franco Mazzucchelli abandoned large inflatable plastic objects – rings, spirals and balls – on beaches, parks and streets. In doing so, the artist left the interpretation of his works, which he called Art to Abandon, to others. The works on display, including the video Alfa Romeo 1971, document the reactions of passers-by: the plastic objects were carried, hung around on and played with. The abandonment of the sculptures does not mark their end. It is through interaction that the works realise themselves anew.
Produced in post-war Italy, they reflect the thoughts of an entire generation of artists: How to overcome the limitations imposed by canvas and pedestal? How to bridge the gap between object and viewer? Questions to which Mazzucchelli finds his own answers. The presented group of works from the 1970s is called Art to Abandon (A. to A.). On view are black and white photographs and PVC fragments of the original sculptures, as well as a series of silkscreen prints collaged with ink writings and photographs. Together with the video Alfa Romeo 1971, they form the only documentation of his public interventions from this period.

Formally, the exhibition is complemented by works by Hanne Darboven, Matt Mullican, and Lara Favaretto, each of whom draws on Mazzucchelli’s work in their own way. The point of departure for Hanne Darboven’s Atta Troll (1989) is Heinrich Heine’s epic poem of the same name, written in 1841/42. The artist adapted the poem in 1989 and translated it into a system of musical notations. Like Mazzucchelli’s inflatable plastic sculptures, which unfold through interaction with the audience, Atta Troll becomes a piece of music, activated through play. The potential of play is also explored in Lara Favaretto’s Twistle. A whistle fills with air at regular intervals. This element of surprise brings the work immediately closer to the visitor. In Mazzucchelli’s practice the urban space also becomes an exhibition space. In Matt Mullican’s work, on the other hand, urban spaces are brought into the exhibition. The grid structure of the diptych represents abstracted city maps.

ChertLüdde Gallery presents the second chapter of the exhibition Art on Art (A. on A.), focusing on recent works from 2010 to the present. Spread over two venues in Berlin, the exhibition explores Franco Mazzucchelli’s practice by looking closely at the impact of art and how to engage a wider audience in art production and discourse.

All Images
Copyright: the artists
Courtesy: Klosterfelde Edition & ChertLüdde
Photos: Marjorie Brunet Plaza

Exhibition through October 21, 2023
Potsdamer Str. 97, 10785 Berlin

In his works, Wilhelm Klotzek approaches the urban body in different ways. In the video News from the Underpass (2023), made in collaboration with Milan Herms, this happens very concretely. The film shows a person, riding a bicycle on and around the station Wartenberg in Berlin. However, the approach does not remain on the surface, but also takes place at a personal level. A voice narrates the film, reading a letter addressed to a flower seller in a shop in the station underpass.

Klotzek performs another variation of the approach in Wartenberger Panels (2023). In short texts, he tells of the hidden art on buildings and of its rediscovery on Berlin’s Alexanderplatz. Analogies emerge between varicose veins and representations of history in the pictorial worlds of the painter Adolph Menzel. These narratives are paired with photographs of the interior life of an apartment. Provisional arrangements of unsorted piles of books or kettles on the gas stove meet observations of Berlin’s urban space.

The three exhibited sculptures Hohenschönhausen, Gehrenseestraße and Springfuhl, (2023) resemble columns or isolated architectural elements. The surfaces of galvanized sheet steel are bent by hand, provided with precise patterns and partially painted. To bridge the supposed inadequacy of their function, Klotzek supplements the sculptures with brooms that reach up to the ceiling; and so it seems as if the sculptures keep the gallery ceiling from falling down.

In the exhibition, Klotzek moves through the urban body that surrounds and yet eludes us. Perhaps this is because it changes rapidly; the old is demolished and the new added. And in the end, a city is a big architectural provisional, whose body disintegrates and is reassembled.

This approach is described in the exhibition as a process that always has an inherent moment of failure. As in the video News from the Underpass, in which the person falls off its bicycle while trying to explore the Wartenberg S-Bahn station, or in the three sculptures Hohenschönhausen, Gehrenseestraße and Springfuhl, which are installed in the gallery space as provisional architectural structures, where it remains unclear what holds what.

All Images 
Copyright and Courtesy: Wilhelm Klotzek & Klosterfelde Edition
Photos: Marjorie Brunet Plaza

Klosterfelde Hamburg
Isestrasse 125, 20149 Hamburg
Exhibition open from April through July 2023

Click here for the English PDF with further details.

April 29 to July 29, 2023
Potsdamer Str. 97, 10785 Berlin

Drawing possesses a fleeting quality. A liminal and unfixed space, it is always on the verge of becoming. While classical definitions of drawing align more with the notion of study or preparation, the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy conceives of drawing as an end in itself, a perceptual attitude, describing it as the “opening of form.”[1] Nancy understands opening in the sense of a beginning, departure, or origin and also as “an availability or inherent capacity.”[2] This notion of opening, or departure, seems fitting for Jorinde Voigt’s exhibition Trade Area, which assembles approximately sixty works made between 2005 and 2018 that trace the development of her diagrammatic explorations of perception and observation. Often undertaken in spaces beyond the artist’s Berlin studio, these intimate works emerge from Voigt’s absorption in other contexts and her concomitant attempt to find a visual language to convey the sounds, interactions, sensations, and associations experienced therein. For nearly two decades, Voigt’s philosophically inflected artistic practice has engaged questions of consciousness, sensation, and presence to articulate graphic systems that sort her impressions of the world. Whether taking the form of frenetic ink markings on graph paper or smooth washes of oil crayon and pencil, these works share an investment in making an idea or a mood tangible and visible—and therefore traversing the boundaries between visible and invisible worlds.

Works like the series Trade Area translate a view of the sea in East Africa into a mini-matrix of space and time, documenting factors like distance, the velocity of the wind, and the movement of objects across the water’s surface in an attempt to register the interlocking rhythms and specificities of place. Mosque—Studie XVII creates a notation to express the dissemination of the adhan, or call to prayer, which is recorded in Mecca and simultaneously broadcast in many mosques throughout the Islamic world. Radiating outwards from the muezzin/speaker, the work graphically communicates the mingling of recorded and live sounds in a mosque on the island of Lamu off the coast of Kenya. Mosque Movie Studie I, on the other hand, functions like an inventory or a documentation of a moment, listing contents such as electricity, muezzin, direction, time, velocity, the speed of wind, and the earth’s rotation. Still other works plot more internal considerations. Now V juxtaposes different notions of time: clock-driven time that dominates most of the industrial world and the more fluid, constant now that prevails throughout the rest of the planet. The series Territorium/Kontinentalgrenze (Job Time Sheet) pits terrestrial boundaries against the various transactions that one undertakes in relation to their own ”territory,” a term Voigt uses in both a political and more broadly personal sense. Created on blank timesheet forms that the artist found in a Kenyan stationary shop, Voigt plots forces of destruction and construction along directional axes to chart the demarcation and exceeding of territorial boundaries as a process of continual negotiation.

Although Voigt belongs to an art historical legacy that spans from the algorithmic patterns and accumulations of Hanne Darboven or Channa Horwitz to the experimental scores of John Cage and György Ligeti, her work possesses a singular fluidity and dynamism that lies in how her drawings—both in their form and in their process—link an inner world of personal experiences and references to the external systems that structure them. The formal language that she develops, as well as her approach to materials and process, resists false binaries like the self and the other or notions of interiority and exteriority in favor of poly-temporal and entangled spaces. Indeed, such an approach aligns with what Nancy describes as the “pleasure” inherent in drawing. Not merely resolved to reproduce existing forms, the gesture that draws for the pleasure of drawing is made “when the design incorporates into its own intention a dimension that exceeds the intention: a tension that allows the form to open itself to its own formation, whatever the idea, aim, or end given.”[3]

Jesi Khadivi
adapted in part from the essay “A Curve That Folds Without Closing” (2022)

[1] Jean-Luc Nancy, The Pleasure in Drawing (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 1.
[2] Ibid, 1.
[3] Ibid, 39.

All Images 
Copyright and Courtesy: Jorinde Voigt & Klosterfelde Edition
Photos: Eric Tschernow

On view were the work series “Worldometer” (2021) and “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” (2020).

“Portrait of a Lady on Fire” filters observations Aleksandra Domanović made on the film with the same title through the political, ideological, and even sexual energies bound within the acts of seeing and perceiving. The film is ostensibly about a female painter commissioned to make a portrait of a women for a potential suitor to consider. We see the women see each other, and we wonder about how they perceive one another. It’s a study on the female gaze, the social contexts that proscribe it, and the sexual tension that steadily grows through it. How these women perceive each other changes the more they see each other. “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” is a manifestation of the power, love, romance, and control in a world without men. (…) Domanović’s new silkscreen works, many featuring the movie’s title, employ an optical phenomenon called simultaneous contrast to extend the relationship between seeing and perceiving. Yellow text, for example, appears to be different hues when juxtaposed against red or blue lines. We are drawn in to test our eyes, to question our vision. How we perceive, these works seem to say, changes the more we see. (Carson Chan)

In “Worldometer”, Domanović plays once again with a visual effect, called persistence of vision. It describes the ability to keep a visual impression after the image has already disappeared. Domanović’s holographic LED fans deploy this principle, while turning it into a sculptural form. The combination of wood turned objects and spinning fans display commercial imagery with a daily update on COVID statistics of the country, where the artworks are exhibited.