Critical, involved, with many layers – that’s how Benedikt Gahl (*1977) and Veit Kowald (*1978) describe art and their intentions behind their works created in all kinds of media. Gallery Adler presents the artist duo from Munich for the first time in Frankfurt, from January 20th to March 18th, 2006, in the exhibition “Dreamgeruch”.

Since 1996, the two art students have been working together on ironic and gloomy videos, spacious installations and sculptures of structured chaos, trying to break out of the encrusted art forms of art gurus and the devotion to academy, even, in their 2005 video „museum“, hammering a hole into a museum’s wall through which they sneak away from the art world.

This ambiguousness is characteristic for the works of Benedikt Gahl and Veit Kowald. In their video “Rigor Mortis” (2004) for example, an amorphous creature deforms itself into iconic pieces of 20th century art - from Henry Moore to a cubic Donald Judd, while on the TV screen before it a similarly vague figure climbs Mount Golgatha and finally nails itself to the cross as a Kippenberger frog, grinning, toasts to its opposite with a mug of beer. Is art destroying itself in order to resurrect itself? Is it asking a bit too much from the lover of new art who is forced to submit to artists’ ever new fancies, ever new pamphlets and manifests? Or is this art’s chance to rediscover itself and, with a beer in hand, to nail the old legacies to the cross…

The artists contrast their figurative elements that form a complex ideological picturial language every now and then with clear lines and strict structures, as in works like “Beton“ (Concrete). Yet, for the exhibition “Dreamgeruch”, the artist duo will develop new works such as the installation “Geheime Botschaft“ (Secret Message) which will be presented for the first time in Frankfurt.

 

8 pm live act Subzone 2: Cloneheadz, Munich