Francisco Klinger Carvalho
*1966, lives in Mannheim and Sao Paulo

 

In Carvalho’s works one encounters the contrast between two systems of ordering, within which the evolved and the constructed combine to make almost everyday objects. In his installations the artist, who grew up in the Brazilian Amazon, unites the materials, traditions and artistic approaches of various cultures.

The space-consuming installation in the hall of Port25 symbolizes the diversity of the          Jungbusch port quarter. Carvalho highlights the links between the residents, the cafés,         cultural centres and businesses by asking these participants for loaned objects, which, for     the exhibition’s duration, he joins together in a ship-shaped enclosing fence to form a large   sculpture. This also includes architectonic elements, such as the concrete cube of the lift.    The discernible leitmotiv is travelling, which resumes a project idea that Carvalho had back    in 2002, during one of his first stays in Mannheim. He planned to permanently moor a ship in    the connecting canal using a grid.

In the foyer the work “Hier bin ich nicht da” is positioned in the vicinity of the bookshop. A  tower built out of open single volumes of the “Thieme Becker” artists’ lexicon makes reference  to endeavours by visual artists to earn recognition and a fixed position in the operating       system called art. Just as the lexicon, which was published in 37 volumes between 1907 and      1950, can never live up to its claim to completeness, for most artists access to the system,    and great fame, remains barred.

 

Francisco Klinger Carvalho studied at the Universidade Federal do Estado do Pará, Belem and     the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. He works have so far been shown in numerous exhibitions in       Brazil, Chile, Germany, Columbia, Austria and Switzerland.

 

 

 

Jutta Grell

*1967, lives in Mannheim

 

Jutta Grell’s canvases were created in a two-part process. The departure point was an           exhibition at the Orgelfabrik in Karlsruhe in 1991, in which Jutta Grell took part as one of   four former students of Horst Antes and exhibited lengths of paper which were decorated on     both sides and were each more than ten metres long. The paper was glued with figurative paper   outlines on one side and painted with oil paint and varnish on the other. Almost ten years      later, Grell segmented the banners and placed the semi-transparent material onto thin linen,    which she stretched on a frame. Once the double-sided paper layer was glued on, waves, tears    and bulges arose which, with their yellowish-beige surface, are reminiscent of dried-out skin.

Grell continuously expands this repertoire of forms developed in these early images and uses   it in modifications to this day. Following archetypal, figurative rock painting or African      sculpture, she uses her own alphabet of figures, which is also unfolded in the décollage        postcards. Without a preliminary drawing she scrapes, scratches, scribes and cuts the           postcards until her flying, tumbling and dancing figures lift off from the original image       motif. Depending on the intensity of the processing, they complement the fragments of the       original image motifs or stand autonomously on the exposed paper ground. Grell has been         working on the décollage postcards since 1990. The latest works in the exhibition are from     this year.

 

Jutta Grell studied painting under Horst Antes at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste  in Karlsruhe and, alongside her artistic work, teaches at a Mannheim high school.

 

 

 

Myriam Holme

*1971, lives in Mannheim

 

The departure point of Myriam Holme’s works is an investigation of the properties of different materials. In her works, contrasts such as gloss and matt, stability and fragility collide, as do granularity and complexity. However, it is never the form or the material by itself that     determines the character of each artistic work by Holme, but their interaction, which becomes   visible in the specific surface structures.

The paintings at Port25 were all created in the final weeks before the exhibition. Layer by     layer, in a complex process, Holme paints fluid, pigmented soap onto the sometimes colourfully pre-prepared canvases. Depending on the process, the layers are then either worn off or         scribed, and the resulting scratches are made visible through inflowing ink. Courageously and   yet calculatedly, the artist presses her fingertips into some of the dried, matt picture       surfaces until these surfaces break open around the pressure points and form lines out of rips and fissures which, with Holme, though they are reminiscent of crackled glazing, do not         indicate any aging process but are used purposefully as a painterly means.

Soaps have different flow speeds: Myriam Holme speaks of fast and slow soaps, which, as they   combine with one another during the working process, react differently and amalgamate now       more, now less intensively.

In June 2017, Holme’s unceasing interest in the experimental possibilities of an expanded       painting process using various materials was honoured through the awarding of the Sparda Art   Prize. The Kunstmuseum Stuttgart acquired some of her works subsequent to the award.

 

Myriam Holme studied at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Karlsruhe under Prof.     Meuser und Prof. Andreas Slominski, and after that she was a master student under Prof.         Andreas Slominski. Today, she teaches at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and, together with        Philipp Morlock, runs the Einraumhaus c/o in Mannheim.

 

 

 

Herbert A. Jung   

*1937, lives in Heidelberg

 

Herbert A. Jung combined a passion for art, particularly his passion for the abstract           paintings of Gerhard Richter, with a professionally generated knowledge of material when,       following his departure from professional life as a doctor of chemistry, he embarked on a       second career path as a visual artist. Since then, with great delight in experimentation, he   has been testing the properties of paints in varying concentrations, viscosities and           luminescences and putting the specifics of water- or organically soluble lacquers and oil       paints to synchronous use.

Herbert A. Jung develops his compositional ideas out of the procedure of material processing:   paints are mixed on the palette knife or scraper before they are applied layer by layer on the support through further filling. The final image thus slowly emerges on canvas, plastic film,   cardboard or glass.

Sometimes, overpainting of reproductions of his own and others’ works forms a springboard for   material and structural research. Often, the overlayering of diverging structures is of         interest to the artist only as an interim step: not uncommonly, he reproduces the result and   uses this state of the work as a springboard for further research using a new technique on      another support or in another format: layer by layer.

The surface structure of the small-format and highly sensitive nail sculptures arises through   Jung’s exposure of commonly available, brand-new nails, which he has previously arranged on a   magnet, to an atmosphere of hydrochloric acid. Ferric chloride crystals form, which slowly     decay on contact with the air and coat the nails with a layer that recalls the decomposition   of archaeological finds.

 

Herbert A. Jung devoted himself exclusively to his artistic projects following completion of   his employment in research and marketing in the chemicals industry in 2002. He runs a studio   house in Heidelberg.

 

 

 

Susanne Lyner

*1949, lives in Basel and Wald ZH

 

Susanne Lyner casts or draws lines onto her visual supports mostly in an apparently stringent   geometric order. Ordering successively, colour by colour, or layering over and over, the       process is repeated as often as it takes for the paint to become its own support. Tool and     basis of this way of working is the artist’s body – its agility and its dimensions determine   the use of the colour material, which is layered through throwing. This process also           necessarily gives rise to “paint remnants”; Lyner continues to process filaments of paint that she has thrown out beyond the desired format. There thus arise, for example, spherical clews,  the “paintballs”, which initially recall yarn or wool and then, due to their unusual colour     diversity and plastic-like materiality, perplex. In the end one realizes that the sphere sits   on the board like a dumpling on a plate – now, what kind of an object do we have here?

The “bellettes der mme fredi” were also created out of excess throws from other works. While   the first thing one sees in the random arrangement of the “bellettes” on the wall is an         equipage of glove puppets, gradually one can discern characters and types, certain virtues and attitudes which can also be found in our contemporaries.

The drawing “immergleichanders” was created during an artist’s fellowship in the Graubünden     Mountains and, despite its almost monumental dimensions, appears fragile and light. The         presentation of the ten-metre-long work, suspended floor to ceiling in the exhibition hall,     illustrates the scope of Lyner’s protracted and alwaysamedifferent working method. Day after   day, week after week, she draws line by line. She thus records the light and mood of the       scenic surroundings obliquely through the selection of colour nuances and their succession on   the substrate.

 

Susanne Lyner studied at the Freie Kunstakademie Basel and is today a member of the WOLF5       studio association in Basel. Since 1999 she has travelled regularly in the context of studio   fellowships to Scandinavia, Latvia, Germany and within Switzerland.