Fenster auf Kipp – Heizung auf Fünf

We live in a time when much that has long been taken for granted is under threat: public health, democracy and peace, social security, economic prosperity, and an intact environment. So-called tipping points refer to such situations in which a system (ecological, political, or social) suddenly and irreversibly changes. Knowing about them is essential for understanding our complex present.
Enrico Freitag, Benedikt Braun, and Konstantin Bayer take different artistic paths to do justice to this wide-ranging theme. In his installations, objects, videos, photographs, and performances, Benedikt Braun explores the idea of a post-capitalist society, sketches the ups and downs of social strata, cements the treatment of the individual ego, and stretches the concept of conventional art practice to the pain threshold.

Enrico Freitag's paintings, drawings, and prints take up themes such as work, production or environmental destruction and, in parallel, direct our gaze to the inner sensitivities of human existence. On the one hand, the artist takes us into a world of work that is both characterised by a contemplative aura and deeply immersed in an active Fordist dystopia of mass production. On the other hand, he shows us the vulnerability and excessive demands of the individual in a world shaped by floods of images and information. In a kind of auto poetic development of this basic idea, series like The Poisoning follows, which is based on a momentous industrial disaster in Japan in the 1950s. Or Fresh Kills, which in its ambiguity refers on the one hand to the world's largest rubbish dump of the same name on the outskirts of New York at the time, and on the other hand almost ironically builds a bridge between factory-fresh, the desire of our consumer society for brand-new goods, and the fleeting moment of having in a throwaway society that pays homage to abundance. At the same time, his colourful expressive pictures are dense with colour mass, oscillate between abstraction and figuration and become autosuggestive motifs and representations of global events and inner states of mind that continue to develop in mental space.

In his current conceptual works, Konstantin Bayer researches historical environmental catastrophes and develops futuristic dystopias. His objects, video works, photographs, and participatory and expansive installations deal in the broadest sense with situations of social upheaval, the arrogance of man, the exploitation of natural resources, the interplay between a technologically advanced society, and backward individual behavior. Sometimes they are extensive thematic exhibitions on the history and present of a particular place, sometimes they are series consisting exclusively of items that can be bought on Amazon and assembled at home.

Enrico Freitag, Benedikt Braun and Konstantin Bayer have been working together on various exhibitions for many years and are engaged in regular intensive artistic exchange. The exhibitions are characterised by overlaps in content and the multitude of different forms of artistic expression.