Grieder Contemporary is delighted to mark the opening of its new project space in Berlin-Charlottenburg with "Geist", an exhibition by Lori Hersberger. With the gallery in Switzerland's Küsnacht/Zurich, Grieder Contemporary is now opening another premises - under the banner "Grieder Contemporary Projects" - in the immediate vicinity of Berlin's Kurfürstendamm. Grieder will be using this traditional old-Berlin apartment on the Mommsenstrasse to present international artists - predominantly those currently making waves in Switzerland - on a six-monthly rotation.

Lori Hersberger: Geist, 2009

installation view at Grieder Contemporary Projects, Berlin

Click on image to enlarge.

The first of these exhibitions features new works by Swiss artist Lori Hersberger who, since the late 1980s, has been working on an eclectic body of work encompassing decidedly abstract painting using artificial fluorescent colours, as well as sculptures and large-scale installations incorporating neon light or mirror glass. His works reflect architecture, but at the same time they have a transformative influence on the presence of the space/room, both by transmogrifying the latter into a picture and by prompting reflections (in both senses). Hersberger's spatial creations make use of industrial materials such as glass and steel, which he enhances with high-gloss lacquering or chrome plating, as well as a range of objects such as musical instruments, empty beer cans and even crashed cars. While the meanings articulate themselves in the corporeal realm in a way that is both emphatically direct and viscerally experienceable, the encoding of the symbolic realm very much ties into the artist's underlying Generation X (1977) experience. In terms of the semiotics involved in this process, decomposition and accentuations generate a figurative syntax of confrontations - a basic tenet characteristic of the artist's overall oeuvre. The abstraction, however, is not presented as a hermetic world: Hersberger's works, rather, aim for a kind of forthrightness that affords insight into the interplay between emptiness and sign, including their atmospheres and fractions, at the point where illusion and disillusion, flirtatiousness and aversion, and reverence and effrontery meet.

Lori Hersberger: Geist, 2009

installation view at Grieder Contemporary Projects, Berlin

Click on image to enlarge.

"Geist" (spirit and/or ghost) finds Hersberger presenting a series of new works incorporating intensely hued neon lighting and collaged images in the gallery's Jugendstil-style rooms (the premises date from 1904 and have been left partly unrenovated). The exhibition explores themes including myth, death and resurrection - such as the geometric neon composition "Death May Be Your Santa Claus" or "Die Kinder von Marx & Coca-Cola" (The children of Marx and Coca-Cola), a German Army helmet dating from 1916, painted fluorescent yellow and filled with the aforementioned beverage. The exploration centres on the evocation and banishment of the un-dead past in the form of visitations by apparitions and shapes. Hauntology is a deconstructive argument introduced by Jacques Derrida against ontology which, throughout the history of philosophy, has always denied that the present exists only with respect to the past; Derrida is seeking to reconceptualise the relationship between presence and absence. That said, Hersberger's work is also imbued with a particular kind of irony against postmodern cynicism: because his oeuvre voices doubt and melancholy as well as freedom and triumph, its critical scope, paradoxically, is broader than if it had adopted a purely cynical stance to traditional values.

Lori Hersberger (*1964 in Basel) lives in Zurich. Solo exhibitions include "Phantom Studies", Musée d'Art Contemporain de Lyon (2008); "Spin My Wheel", Kunsthaus Zurich (2003); "Snow Blind", Badischer Kunstverein Karlsruhe (2003); "How Can You Kill Me? (I'm Already Dead)", Swiss Institute New York (2002); "Day-Glo Blues Conspiracy", Museum für Gegenwartskunst Basel (2001).

Group exhibitions include Kunstmuseum St. Gallen (2007), Kunstmuseum Lucerne (2005), SMAK Museum of Contemporary Art Gent (2004), Kunsthalle Vienna (2003), Museum zu Allerheiligen Schaffhausen (2001), 48th Venice Biennale (1999), Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Akademie der Künste Berlin (1998).

A catalogue entitled "Lori Hersberger - Phantom Studies" will be appearing in autumn 2009, published by the Museum of Contemporary Art Lyon in association with JRP | Ringier.

During Artforum Berlin our new project space will be open from Thursday, September 24, until Saturday, September 26, from 11 am until 6 pm and by appointment.