In June 2010, our first “five in a row” started with a show by Julian Fickler; now, a year later, Julian is back with new works. While last year’s paintings were expressive, gaudy pieces in oil, Julian’s new works are muted, seemingly introspective, produced with watercolour on cloth, with the shapes of supplemental stretcher bars subtly poking through the cloth from behind. What they share is Julian’s commitment to the painterly experiment, to the expressive or constructive treatment of the panel.

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About one year after the first one, we held a third five in a row at the Kunstraum: Morgenstraße. The evening opened with a performance by Felix Grünschloß, who had invited five Zen students to hold a meditation session in the Kunstraum. With their faces towards the gallery wall, the Buddhists were on one hand subjected to the gaze of the visitors, and on the other hand somehow protected from the “spectacle” of the art show opening on which they had turned their back on. For the next show under the title “you are invited”, we asked three artists from the Art Academy to not only show a work of their own, but to also invite one more artist each – the resulting “group show” covered all possible genres from painting to a very ephemeral site-specific performance/installation. At nine, we had a introspective installation and drawings by Sebastian Winkler, which was followed by a show of five photographs by Frederik Busch – portraits of bouncers, larger than life and uncannily corresponding with the evening’s first event. The final show was a performance and installation by Nele Gräber & Julia Sinner, which in the end dissolved into a quite nutritious social sculpture.

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The corresponding exhibition to “Touching the Void” opened one day later in Mannheim – here, we showed works by eight artists which in one way or the other dealt with the image as a space, and the transfers and transgressions between dimensions. Gregor Gleiwitz‘ and Enrico Bach’s oil paintings  created space within – or beyond? – the canvas; Markus Zimmermann‘s objects where takes on both the minimalist tradition and a negative construction of space, while Chul-Hyun Ahn merges minimal aesthetics with the illusionist approach of op-art. Matt Calderwood and Annabel Lange take on the white cube itself with poetic and humorous twists, and Joe Merrell presents us with the city as a graphic, while simultaneously supercharging both the temporal and three-dimensional experience of a nightly promenade. Finally, the piece by Andreas Lorenschat shows us that the creation of an imaginary space cannot solely rely on objects, but also on words, and memories.

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For 2010/11, the Kunstbüro Baden-Württemberg (a state foundation for the arts) has set up an interesting exchange programme for regional art spaces – over a dozen artist initiatives and independent exhibition spaces have been invited to choose a partner and produce a show in their space – with friendly support from the Kunstbüro. While the Kunstraum: Morgenstraße was visited by the great people from CoCAO in March, our partner was zeitraumexit in Mannheim, were we realized a exhibition on the spatiality of images. The show in Mannheim had a counterpart in Karlsruhe, where we juxtaposed works by Enrico Bach and Dennis Feddersen; Enrico’s paintings, which evoke a both painterly and illusionist spatiality within the boundaries of the canvas, stand in contrast to the installation by Dennis – a three-dimensional snapshot of matter breaking and expanding, which, with its black shapes and lines, might just as well be a spatial rendition of weird scientific diagram.