SAN ANTONIO, TX.- San Antonio’s first and longest running contemporary art non-profit, Blue Star Contemporary (located in the heart of the Blue Star Arts Complex), presents Fünf, on view June 7–September 8, 2019. This exhibition highlights the fifth year of Blue Star Contemporary’s Berlin Residency program and features artworks from 2017-2018 artists Amada Miller, Andrei Renteria, Ethel Shipton, and Jared Theis.

Blue Star Contemporary annually selects four artists residing in Bexar County to take part in three-month residencies at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, Germany. While in residence, the artists are given a studio and living space, as well as access to workshops, exhibition opportunities, and studio visits with international curators. The exhibition title—Fünf means five in German—celebrates the fifth year of the Blue Star Contemporary Berlin Residency, which concluded in July of 2018.

The artists featured in Fünf present works they developed while in residence at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien and upon their return to San Antonio. Fünf brings together four artists in an important exhibition, highlighting the diversity of practices in the San Antonio art community and the impact of this life changing residency.

While in residence at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Ethel Shipton worked daily to create a mural on her studio wall, using only tape she found in the studio. She continually documented this process, knowing the work would find a new form after leaving Berlin. Fünf features a video installation, as well as a relic from the studio mural. Shipton’s work highlights the idiosyncrasies of a place as observation of the traces of others, seen and heard when we listen and look closely.

Jared Theis’ imagined fantasy worlds incorporate performance, video, costuming, animation, sculpture, and set building. Theis’ environmental installations feature the debut of a two-part tragic love story, The Seasons and Vissi d’Arte. The exhibition also features his 2018 works Lolita in the Grass and What Night Tells Me.

Andrei Renteria’s large scale drawings discuss human rights injustices, often illuminating accounts along the U.S./Mexico border. The region is personal and political and following his time in Berlin, Renteria aims to approach the subject symbolically. A series of drawings of funerary wreaths and sculptures depict subversive methods of violence and intimidation sent to victims messaging their fate.

Amada Miller’s work looks at how we interact with and explain the universe outside of our planet through points of intersection, utilizing research and materials unearthed from the European Space Agency archives and Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin, Germany, Miller’s installation features 55 glass bells with iron casted meteorite clappers. The artist takes inspiration from the Apollo 12 mission and its astronauts describing the moon ringing like a bell for 55 minutes after crash landing a module on the lunar surface.