Museum Frieder Burda mounts a major thematic exhibition on the motif of the candle

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Museum Frieder Burda mounts a major thematic exhibition on the motif of the candle
Jeff Koons, Candle, 2001, Privatsammlung © Jeff Koons, 2016; Courtesy Gagosion Gallery.



BADEN-BADEN.- The starting point of the exhibition is the “Candle” by Gerhard Richter. More than 50 paintings, sculptures, installations, video works and photographs, by artists such as Marina Abramović, Georg Baselitz, Christian Boltanski, Thomas Demand, Urs Fischer, Eric Fischl, Peter Fischli und David Weiss, Jörg Immendorff, Karin Kneffel, Jeff Koons, Alicja Kwade, Nam June Paik, A. R. Penck, Andreas Slominski and Thomas Ruff, bear testimony to the topicality of the subject in contemporary art.

The candle stands upright – as a symbol for the length of a life, as a sign of rational enlightenment, as a ray of hope on the horizon and even as an indication of a latent sexual desire. From its physical luminescence to spiritual transcendence, from vanity to Eros: the candle as a theme has manifold meanings. The picture of a candle by Gerhard Richter, which has attained iconic status, means the Collection Frieder Burda possesses a central work on the topic – and the museum is glad to avail of the opportunity to shine a light on the complexity of the theme and assess its relevance in contemporary art.

Frieder Burda has this to say about the exhibition: “The picture “Candle” by Gerhard Richter counts as one of the icons of my collection. Many visitors and friends of this house go so far as to associate the essence of the collection with the idea behind the picture. All the more reason for me to be happy that we succeeded in presenting such a high-calibre, diverse and at times provocative exhibition on the subject.” Helmut Friedel, curator of the exhibition, adds: “The candle theme captivates the observer because of the elementary existential experiences, life and death, with which the candle is associated. With these wide-ranging messages and layers of expression, Richter’s painting from the Sammlung Frieder Burda forms an ideal point of departure from which to look at various pieces of contemporary art depicting the same theme.

The Candle as a Theme from Daily Life
The candle accompanies us from baptism to burial, lighting up advent wreaths and birthday cakes, churches, political vigils or romantic candlelight dinners. After the terrorist attacks in Paris and Brussels, thousands of people lit candles not just at the scenes of the attacks but also at other spots around the world. They were expressing their grief and, at the same time, declaring their solidarity with the victims. Since time immemorial, candles have been an essential element of religious practices – especially where life and death meet, at the crossroads between godly eternity and human transience: They symbolise the immaterial or the transcendent and stand for the relationship between the spiritual and the material.

On the Genesis of the Theme
The candle was already a fixture of pictorial themes in the repertoires of late mediaeval artists, charging images of the life of Christ or Mary with additional symbolism. With Caravaggio and his successors, the candle gave the interior a dramatic atmosphere – and a hidden clue to a subtext pregnant with meaning. Especially in Dutch still life paintings, the candle expresses the notion of the finiteness of all life. In the age of the Enlightenment, it became a symbol of scientific insight. In romanticism, the candle was used to portray moments of desire, while Expressionists also made use of this highly expressive theme. Max Beckmann, for example, availed of traditional interpretations of the candle’s significance in several paintings and combined them with his ground-breaking painting achievements. Pablo Picasso, too, made use of the symbolic diversity of the candle theme in several still lifes, adding highly personal nuances – one of his candle paintings from 1952 is said to stand for his extinguished love for Françoise Gilot.

Gerhard Richter’s “Candle”
Gerhard Richter was surely aware of all this when he devoted intense attention to the candle as a theme from 1982, even though it was the simplicity of the theme, above all, that interested him. He explains his penchant for (candle) still life as follows: “Because they are all around us. We all need them. My work has to do with the attempt to do something that can be understood in this day and age.” Thus, the artist refers to a special quality that is innate to the candle: it is a symbolic object with which we are familiar. To date, Gerhard Richter has created 29 paintings on the subject, one of which is owned by the Sammlung Frieder Burda, another (“Skull with Candle”) and three candle editions and four atlas boards which the artist used to prepare his candle cycle, are now being shown as a visual point of reference at the exhibition.

A far-reaching aura: Gerhard Richter’s student Karin Kneffel has also designed a new series of images referring to his iconic candle theme for the exhibition. In doing so, Kneffel has preserved the format used by Richter, composition and how the picture is divided up. But her world is one of reflections and/or rendering unreal. The images are characterised by coolness and a differentiated treatment of the dominance of this theme, whatever the meaning with which it is charged.

The Candle as a Theme of Contemporary Art in Various Media
Karin Kneffel is not alone; other contemporary artists have addressed the theme in the most diverse of media: led by the phalanx of major German painters since the 1980s. In addition to Markus Lüpertz and A. R. Penck, above all Georg Baselitz and Jörg Immendorff are worthy of mention. With the title “Kerzenfriedenfreud” (“Candle-Peace-Joy”), which resembles a play on words in German, Georg Baselitz positively urges the observer to decipher the image – here; the candle emerges as a synonym for suppressed sexuality and desire. Entitled by the artist himself as “Negerchen mit Kerze” (“Little Nigger with Candle”), the work by Jörg Immendorff is a total provocation. It portrays the caricaturally exaggerated image of a black person with puffed-up cheeks, blowing out a candle – an equally biting and exposing commentary on every bourgeois form of racism.

More poppy – albeit maintaining a critical distance to Pop Art – the great American artist of the 1980s: Jeff Koons. Bikinis and undergarments, strands of hair, naked skin, flowers and landscape sections with mountains and lakes combine in his picture “Candle” to form an overboard collage. The painting is about the sexualisation of wares by the advertising industry through which even innocent themes of desire are (de)generated into consumer goods.

Robert Gober also plays with the supposed banality and everyday nature of the theme. His combination of a flat piece of beeswax, with human hair attached and from which a candle is growing upwards is bordering on the bizarre. Although this candle is portrayed in “virgin” condition – it is not burning and is never intended to do so – it has already lost all its innocence by virtue of the clarity with which it is portrayed as a phallus. The work was created at the time of the AIDS crisis in America, as the debates caused by the fear of HIV engulfed the art scene. At the same time, it is a silent memorial to all those who fell victim to the epidemic.

The artist duo Fischli/Weiss confronts the observer with a black decorative candle, an imitation recast in per acrylic in all its pathetic ugliness. During their creative period together (which lasted until the death of David Weiss in 2012), Fischli/Weiss strove to de-hierarchize the world of things. The artist duo consistently poked fun at the craze for originality that surrounds us and confronted it with a different, simple explanation of the world that was laden with humour and irony.

Another Swiss artist, Urs Fischer, who now lives in New York, sets fire to artworks by other artists. The life-sized sculpture by Giambologna recast in wax, which spectacularly melted at the Biennial in Venice in 2011 remains unforgettable. At the Museum Frieder Burda, it is Dan Flavin’s “Monument 1 for V. Tatlin”, a light installation made up of white fluorescent tubes, which gets the treatment. Fischer has translated this into the contrary material wax. While in Flavin’s work it is the (electric) light that makes the sculpture possible in the first place, in Fischer’s work it is the (candle-) light that triggers its destruction. Just that process of melting is also the most important element of his sculpture, as he says himself: “Nature simply looks good but decay is the beautiful aspect of it”.

The famous candle installation by Nam June Paik entitled “Buddha“ from 1989 is completely different, adhering to the far-eastern traditions of meditation and contemplation. Through the combination of western technology and eastern thinking, Paik creates a connection between the Buddhist faith and the eternal repetition and the reproduction of the ever-same in electronic media. In 1989, that meant he was at the cutting edge of media-theoretical debate. In the equally spectacular video work “One Candle“, which Nam June Paik realised in 1989 at the Portikus Frankfurt, a simple candle flame and complicated video technology enter an interesting and stimulating relationship.

Christian Boltanski also chose the candle as a reduced but hence all the more expressive picture theme for many of his works. “Les Ombres“–“The Shadows” is one of the best known installations from Christian Boltanski’s series, “Théâtre d’Ombres”. Six little tin strips cut with scissors, illuminated by the flames of tea candles, cast delicate and eerily flickering shadows on the wall. With this shadow theatre, Boltanski turns his theme of remembrance work into allegory by demonstrating the tensions in relationship between life and death.

There is a spiritual nature to Jeppe Hein’s “Candle Box“ from 2013, too. The candle behind a dark mirror refers to the spiritual belief in an inner eye that enables one to perceive the world beyond the usual powers of sight and attain a certain level of enlightenment. At the same time, the flames appearing at head level are reminiscent of the traditional portrayals of Pentecost, when the apostles acquired the miraculous gift of speaking all tongues and thus reach all people, regardless of their “nationality” or “ethnicity”. In a manner similar to this iconography, “Candle Box“ also seems to enlighten the observer by “holding a mirror” up to him.

But it is not only male artists who devote their attentions to this diverse theme: in her self-portrait “Artist Portrait With a Candle” from the series “With Eyes Closed I See Happiness”, Marina Abramović, whose performance have tested the boundaries of the physically and psychologically bearable, challenges the visitor to achieve a state of inner peace through meditation by observing a burning candle.

In her eponymously titled work, her younger colleague, Alicja Kwade, “teleports” three burning candles standing on the ground by positioning them along a glass wall like a folding screen, so that they are reflected on different walls at once and hence appear to move from one side to another – here this work is about the search for ways to transport light or energy.

The well-known American concept artists Louise Lawler plays with the media of drawing and photography. Her work “Still life (Candle)” is based on a colour photograph from 2003, a “date painting” by the Japanese artist On Kawara on the wall of a private interior. Like the painting on the wall, the table in front of it tells of the inexorable passage of time: empty wine glasses, a full ashtray and a scrunched-up napkin remind us that the table must have been the scene of a meal and a conversation shortly beforehand.

Photography is also a subject for Thomas Ruff. His work shows an out-of-focus black and white photograph, a scene from a German living room in the 1980s, with a working, old-fashioned television set at the centre. On the TV, in turn, is a Christmas pyramid with burning candles. Between 1981 and 1991 the artists collected some 2,500 illustrations from German-language newspapers and selected 400 images from this archive, which he photographed, numbered and reproduced without explanatory captions. The resulting works, stripped of original informative context, pose the question of how comprehensible the photographs remain – and oblige the observer to take on the guise of a detective.

In addition to the pictorial artworks, the exhibition broadens the perspective to include the role of the candle in film. The compilation film “The Candle in the Spotlight” highlights candle moments from the entire history of film according to diverse formal and content-related criteria and explores the field of tension between paintings and films.










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