May 3 to July 29, 2017
Potsdamer Str. 97, 10785 Berlin

H.M.Klosterfelde Edition

With UH OH NO AH HA, H.M. Klosterfelde Edition is presenting a series of newly printed editions by American artist Kay Rosen. The new editions will be accompanied by a selection of drawings, collages and a painting by the artist. Working with words and language, Rosen comments and emphasizes recent and ever present issues of our societies: ever witty, political, subtle but never quiet.

Trained in languages and linguistics, Kay Rosen realized in the 1970’s that what interested her most about language had to be expressed visually, so she left academia and started over from square one as a “self-taught” artist. Drawing on her linguistic background, she began an exploration of the intersection of meaning and structure in language through color, materials, scale, composition, typography, and graphic design. Her investigation into alternative functions of language continues until today.

Kay Rosen’s paintings, drawings, editions, collages, installations, and videos have been presented in solo and group exhibitions in galleries, museums and institutions, nationally and internationally, for four decades, among them the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia; The Art Institute of Chicago; the Whitney Biennial 2000 and 1991 (as part of Group Material’s “AIDS Timeline”); Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Germany; Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein; Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam; and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (L.A. MoCA), which hosted her mid-career survey exhibition in 1998-1999. Recent solo exhibitions include The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, CT, USA, and Sikkema Jenkins Gallery in New York, USA. An upcoming solo show will be taking place at Barbara Krakow Gallery, Boston, USA.

Rosen’s work resides in collections in Europe and America, it has been featured in numerous publications, such as Artforum, Art in America, and The New York Times; and it has earned many honors. Rosen taught at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago for more than twenty years. More can be learned about her at www.kayrosen.com.

Please contact Alfons Klosterfelde at office(at)helgamariaklosterfelde.de for further information.
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March 6 to April 21, 2012
Potsdamer Straße 97, 10785 Berlin

Kay Rosen

„Mined“, 1984/2012
64 pages
Offset Print on Munken Pure paper
Production: Manuel Raeder, Berlin
Published by Helga Maria Klosterfelde Edition
Edition of 500 copies
EUR 20,

MINED was written in 1984, sparked by outrage over the policies of the Reagan administration. The issues explored in the book via language, design, type, and images were not exclusive to this decade nor to the United States, however many references are linked to U.S. history and to idiomatic American expressions. I had protested many of them before and since, but the form of this particular expression of outrage was inspired partly by a graphic design job I had at a small weekly newspaper where I had access to an old-fashioned typography machine which photographically processed strips or blocks of set type. I wouldn’t have a computer for another fifteen years. A hapless chimpanzee at a typewriter (“man monkeying around”) attempts a task far beyond its limitations or understanding and unleashes a stream of events that linguistically play off each other page by page. They eventually cycle back to the chimp through a closed-end tale of revolution (“No Noose Is Good Noose”), militarism, and environmental degradation. At the end the chimp is still trying to figure it out. Kay Rosen, 2012

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Matthew Antezzo

New Government, Akwesasne Notes, 1975, 2002
pencil and graphite on paper
14.76 x 17.32 inches
37.5 x 44 cm

Cady Noland

o.T., 1994
ink on aluminium
39.2 x 33.2 cm

Dan Peterman

One Ton Sulfur Dioxine Emission Allowance, 1993
offset print on paper
21,5 x 28 cm

Kay Rosen

Mistake, 1995/96
sign paint on museum purpose cardboard
40 x 72,39 cm

Kay Rosen

Grayv Train, 2008
Enamel sign paint on canvas
30,5 x 45,7 cm

January 20 to April 26, 2009
Linienstraße 160, 10115 Berlin

Love Letter, 1/20/2009, commemorates the inauguration of Barack Obama as president of the United States on January 20, 2009. After the eight-year Bush-Cheney nightmare, any change is welcome, but the things that Obama stands for will hopefully bring about real change and real hope, not just for the United States, but for the world. Love Letter continues a theme formerly used in the Klosterfelde edition O (1999), whose nine titles range from “Open” to “Halo,” in which O functions as a visual object as well as a letter. The edition Stilllife with Blue Table (Earthquake) (2007) slyly contains an O which behaves as an orange and a letter. As letters and symbols, the O’s and X’s in Love Letter are semi-abstract and universal, transcending language’s meaning and syntax. They may be considered ciphers or stand-ins for other things. For example, the O’s might represent Obama, with the X’s the alternative that is rejected. X’s and O’s might represent hugs and kisses, an affectionate way of signing off a letter. Just as a previous generation was designated X, the current state of mind is resoundingly O. The beauty of these letters is their ability to transform themselves, making many interpretations possible.

Please contact us for further Information.
photos: Nick Ash
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September 6th to December 15th, 2007
Linienstraße 160, Berlin
photos: Susanne Ullerich

Helga Maria Klosterfelde is delighted to present a new edition by American artist Kay Rosen. The work will be shown at Linienstrasse 160 together with her earlier editions published during the last 15 years with Helga Maria Klosterfelde Edition, starting September 6th, 2007.

Text in its physical manifestations such as colour, size and typography, as well as in its structure and infinite semantic possibilities has been artistic source material for Kay Rosen since the 1970s. In the process the studied linguist takes interest in the cultural and political potential of language, examining it with word-play, humour and overstatements, displacement or inversion of meaning. Strongly influenced by experimental dance, music and performance art in early years, Rosen understands language first and foremost as performative exercise, and dealing with it always as an act of hearing, speaking and seeing.

The early Read Lips (1993) is exemplary for this, as it displays the word MUM over three pages both as text and as image, the latter depicting the sketched movements of the mouth while pronouncing the word. The different states of lip-movement correspond with the shapes of the letters M, U, and M – synchronizing the written language with the visual and the oral system of signs. The edition entitled, Open, Orb, Orifice, Donut, Globe, Hole, Whole, Halo, Zero from 1999, plays with language as a rendez-vous of poetic imagery and performative act. A simple letter O is painted here directly onto the wall as a fluorescent orange circle by means of a stencil. The O shifts from ornament to semantic carrier through its title that strings together nine terms, each containing the letter O, that can all be represented with the shape of a circle. Through the act of speaking the oral richness of the vowel O is being expressed and the text turns into an event.

Drawing on the classic genre of painting, the new work Stilllife with Blue Table (Earth Quake) (2007) finally carries the object-like behaviour of language – text-as-image as we might encounter on advertising signs and in headlines – to extremes. The items of the still life are pictured merely by the use of the initial letter of the delineated word, respectively – a T for a table, a V for a vase, and U for urn. The orange O appears as a reference to the earlier edition, however here clearly belonging to the image in its representational allocation, signifier and signified are becoming one. In the inverse meaning of still the letters-come-image have incurred into ominous movement, which for the ever politically thinking artist also paraphrases the condition of our world.

The work points to the receptive two-way task of seeing and reading – the viewer has to finish reading the particular letters in their minds eye in order to see the image. Elsewhere Kay Rosen once said, In order to reconstruct meaning, the reader is invited to become a viewer, to see and to reason rather than to read. Seeing, thinking, reading – Kay Rosen challenges us expertly in all three categories.

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February 1st to March 17th, 2007
Linienstraße 160, Berlin
photos: Susanne Ullerich

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Click here for available artworks by General Idea, Christian Jankowski, Kay Rosen, Lawrence Weiner