Goldfever (Group Exhibition)

with artworks by Dittmar Danner aka Krüger, Ute Essig, Renate Hampke, Nataly Hocke, Harald Kohlmetz, Henrik U. Müller, Dirk Rathke, Ursula Sax, Karina Spechter and Bettina Weiß
Special guest: Uli Aigner, "ONE MILLION"

For one year now we have been living in an exceptional situation we could not have imagined even in our worst nightmares. Corona determines our everyday life!

The warnings of future pandemics and their impact on our lives, however, have been known for decades. Only few have taken them seriously. Now, we are right in the middle of it and hoping to be able to escape the distressful misery by aid of the vaccine that has been tailored for us in no time at all. So we are confidently making our way through the frustrations of our new daily lives.  

Our socio-cultural lives have been turned upside down and the lack of physical contact between family members, friends and acquaintances has taken hold our lives. We have been deprived the experience of naturally merging with the group (however large), and participation in social life through concerts, theatrical performances, but also exhibitions in museums and galleries. Our longing for culture and art, in contrast, keeps growing every day.  

So, when lockdown regulations will be eased soon, the next group exhibition entitled Gold Fever will come like a call. The exhibition can be conceived as a symbol of our curiosity for discovering something new, a notion of awakening, and at the same time contain implications of reliability and wealth – in the sense of abundance and variability of art and cultural encounters, but also as richness of all that has been understood through the year: art and culture are our self-defining texture and projection surface, but also the spiritual goods that make up our human condition. No private event or get together can be imagined without culture as an essential component! 

Therefore it is all the more shameful that German policy has lumped together the concepts of culture and leisure in a country that is or has once been known as the land of poets and thinkers. How low has the world of culture sunk in public esteem and nomenclature to find itself almost trash-like reduced to the concept of leisure? In fact, how detached are policy and art? Germany as a rundown amusement park in clown pants, as one might be inclined to think. Lately, people must have come to their senses again and the term culture is back in use. Thanks to numerous protests!

So, art is still attracting and expanding our minds, like a gold fever – a gold rush. Yet, as we know, all that glitters is not gold. However, a glittering illusion can also be part of an artistic strategy. But not every artist can afford to use gold as raw material, so petrochemical industry will gladly step in for it. The illusion of gold mimics its value, but is still based on the traditional metaphor of wealth and power that has been shaped over the centuries, transcending its divinity and vastness – or speaking in less divine terms – the spiritual universe. Art has replaced religion. Its diversity – be it in painting or sculpture, theatre or opera, pop music, performance, dance or fashion – helps create a mental space, a resonating body for introspection. It helps us to understand who we are. The forced break of almost one year now has certainly brought us closer to ourselves. 

In times of economic crisis, there is – who would be surprised – a run on gold. And not without reason!

Besides the gallery artists, Uli Aigner has been invited as special guest to present a selection of her life’s work ONE MILLION, and there is a very good reason for this invitation, apart from the charming 12 karat gold surfacing on the inside of her white porcelain vessels: ambition and reality of her work have the ability to delightfully transcend what has long become real: the simultaneity of everything in this wide world, which in turn is only a small fraction of the universe. By now, Corona has made obvious to us that all things and people are interrelated. The invisible virus has taken the world hostage in a flash. Globalism has its opportunities but also its price. Besides, gold might have the potential to halt the spread of the virus, as it is antiseptic!  

Semjon H. N. Semjon in March 2021

gold fever

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