FRANKFURT.- The “Jürgen Ponto-Stiftung zur Förderung junger Künstler” has been awarding working grants to young artists since 2003. Benjamin Hirte and Christoph Knecht, the recipients of the years 2013/14, are now presenting their works at the MMK 3, a part of the MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main.

Benjamin Hirte and Christoph Knecht were selected for their grants by a jury of four made up of the Jürgen Ponto-Stiftung’s specialized visual arts curator Ingrid Mössinger, the director of the MMK Dr. Susanne Gaensheimer, the art collector Klaus F. K. Schmidt and Ralf Suermann, the executive director of the “Jürgen Ponto-Stiftung zur Förderung junger Künstler”, Berlin. “The Jürgen Ponto Stiftung has been supporting our exhibition program at the MMK 3 with great dedication for many years. Every two years, this productive collaboration culminates in the presentation of the grant recipients’ works”, explains MMK director Dr. Susanne Gaensheimer.

The title “open handed” refers to the open collaboration between the two artists in the exhibition, but also to the multifaceted nature of their artistic practice. In both œuvres, references to everyday objects – architecture, design and communication – lead to critical reflection on cultural history and forms of display. The familiar and the apparently historical are rearranged and restaged. Sculptural aspects combine with language, the concrete with the abstract, the opulent with the minimal, the traditional with the modern. A common feature of the two grant recipients’ works is the combination of different artistic media and techniques such as sculpture, painting, and installation. Within the framework of their cooperation in the exhibition at the MMK 3, each of the two artists has made conscious reference to the works of the other.

Benjamin Hirte directs the focus of his works towards everyday forms and texts of the kind known to us from, for example, advertising and the consumer world. The artist brings the aesthetic value of the objects to the fore and further expands it, questioning and restructuring meanings in the process. By enlarging the individual objects completely out of proportion, Hirte divests them of their original contexts. Primarily industrial materials, which he processes with the aid of industrial methods, form the basis of his works, many of which he develops with the aid of computer technology. The untitled (tags) workgroup of 2014 is made of cement-bonded particleboard of the kind usually used in façade or interior construction. For these works the artist enlarges merchandise hangers of the kind found in DIY warehouses, textile discounters and supermarkets. For the most part they are plastic tags which are attached to the merchandise and labelled with information about it, while also facilitating the space-saving and secure display of the merchandise on hooks. Robbed of their purpose, the tags are now presented as aesthetic objects in and of themselves. Their English titling plays with ambiguities and the disintegration of conventional conceptions. The viewer attributes a meaning of his own to the bulky merchandise hangers. The reduction to the variously formed openings in a given tag raises the question as to what product it held. What is more, we think we recognize faces and other familiar structures in these objects, a cognitive phenomenon known as pareidolia.

Christoph Knecht masters various artistic working techniques. He draws on a long art-historical tradition and visually translates certain techniques into the present day. The works from the series Plant of Opportunities represent similar motifs in differing techniques. The artist’s botanical depictions look as if they had come straight from a botanical encyclopaedia and are reminiscent of Maria Sibylla Merian’s Book of Flowers. The draughtswoman of Frankfurt produced the illustrations to serve seventeenth-century ladies as an orientation for their embroidery work, but also explicitly intended them to cater to the tastes of art lovers. The reference to translation into other techniques is also found elsewhere in Christoph Knecht’s work. He carries out his extremely detailed illustrations of imaginary plants that sprout different blossoms and leaves in the painting as well as the etching medium. Originally used to document the flora of foreign lands, these depictions of exotic-looking plants are an allusion to the cultural and pictorial-linguistic mobility of society then and now. The cultural acquisition of expressive forms is always a key element of Knecht’s works. The technique he used to make his tile friezes, for example, makes reference to the acquisition of Chinese porcelain art by the European royal courts. It is also with these tile friezes that Knecht actively integrates the architecture of the exhibition space into his work – and thus forges a link to the works of Benjamin Hirte, who has made the visual structures of everyday life the core element of his art.

The Jürgen Ponto-Stiftung was founded by Ignes Ponto and the Dresdner Bank in 1977 after the assassination of Jürgen Ponto (1923–1977), the executive spokesman of the Dresdner Bank. The foundation awards grants to persons working in music, the visual arts, literature and the performing arts. In the area of the visual arts, it aims to assist young artists at the beginning of their careers. “With grants as well as allowances for material costs, we enable selected artists to create optimal working conditions for themselves, free of economic constraints, in the decisive transition phase between academic training and independent artistic livelihood”, comments Ralf Suermann, executive director of the Jürgen Ponto-Stiftung.