BERLIN.- Gallery Kit Schulte Contemporary Art opened the fall season with a double solo exhibition with Berlin artists Werner Linster and Susanne Ring.
Linster uses literary texts and ancient writing systems as a source of ideas and draws his inspiration from Joyce, Beckett, Wittgenstein, Kafka, as well as from the pictographs of the Chinese Shang dynasty, or historical ‘Gaunerzinken’, a secret graphic sign system of gypsies, hobos, vagabonds and peddlers. From these visual inspirations, he creates drawings and his own system of graphic signatures.
For the show Doodling the World, Linster researched the cross-media divergence in manuscripts and letters of Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett and presents these swift and simultaneously dynamic, often comic-like visual fantasies as found footage. He discovered the Doodles like pressed flowers, bugs or butterflies between the pages. Copied out in his own hand, they are now presented on the gallery’s walls, thus directing the focus of attention to an unknown characteristic of the author’s aesthetics and personality. Linster offers a stage for these odd figurations, this search in form of (seemingly) thoughtless scribblings: he presents the doodles on small tables, drawn in a style reflecting the sketchy impression of the exhibit. Standing, lying or sitting in this new limelight, they pose like whimsical, bizarre and animate objects.
Werner Linster, (born 1956), studied art, art history and art pedagogy at Johannes Gutenberg-Universität in Mainz, Germany, and at St. Martin’s School of Art in London. He lives and works in Berlin. His drawings and sculptures draw from his research in the crossover fields of cultural history of script- and pictureformation, experimental literature and music, and the physical expression in drawing. Linster’s works were presented in numerous solo and group shows in Berlin, London, San Francisco, Warsaw, Freiburg and Mainz.
Freaks of Nature is the title of an exhibition series, produced as a retrospective by the Badische Landesmuseum Karlsruhe in 2011 and 2012 for the Berlin artist Susanne Ring. Freaks Of Nature presents her three-dimensional ensembles, merging figurative sculpture with built objects in a stage-like installation. In the published exhibition catalog, Jacqueline Maltuhan-Redling writes:
'Freaks of Nature' reveals itself as a visual cosmos of fantastic, grotesk, strange and peculiar beings. They confront the viewer directly and accentuate human nature and its’ excrecences with great creative passion. The disclosure of these dynamics may be shocking and simultaneously fascinating. But theses 'Freaks of nature’ can not be understood as a critique of human behavior, nor as a palliative. The distinctiveness lays in the call for our consciousness to meet universal existence with a sharp sensibility.
Like Linster, Ring produces masses of scetches -- though not on paper, but as sculptures out of clay. She as well gives stage to the process of reflection and projection: seeking, finding, selecting and arranging. Ring directs and sets her beings into ensembles, so that they appear as moments in time or passages of stories. In combining the single works made from various materials, she examines the psychological fragility beneath the human surface. Curiously, the viewer discovers inner portraits, intermingled with hints to the scary, the grotesk and eerie things. Ring and Linster share their fascination for the absurd and their subtle sense for emotional and social structures.
Susanne Ring was born in Mainz in 1967 and lives and works in Berlin. She studied at the renowned University of Art (UdK) in Berlin with Professor Dieter Apelt und Professor Christiane Möbus and finished her master with excellency. She teaches art in different institutions, and as a substitute professor at the University of Art Dresden. Her work has been presented in many museum and gallery exhibitions and is part of several important public and private collections.
