PAPER / Axel Obiger – Objects

Jo Manby

PAPER Gallery Manchester and Axel Obiger Berlin bring together the works of sixteen artists working in both Berlin and the United Kingdom in a collaborative exhibition project first planned for 2020. It features the work of: Louise Bristow, Louisa Chambers, Lisa Denyer, Caitlin Griffiths, David Hancock, Peter Hock, Jeffrey Knopf & Angela Tait, Merja Kokkonen, Gabriele Künne, Niina Lehtonen Braun, Matthew Macaulay, Maja Rohwetter, Ruby Tingle, Lisa Wilkens and Hannah Wooll. In the following review, Jo Manby focuses on five of the artists in the group exhibition, ‘Objects’, on show at Axel Obiger Berlin until 29 April 2023.

Taking works from five artists showing in ‘Objects’, the collaborative exhibition curated by PAPER Gallery Manchester and Axel Obiger Berlin, reveals a transformative power: what they have in common is a re-imagining of reality rather than a depiction of reality. Each artist sees beyond what they have set up in front of them: objects, which to a lesser or greater degree, coalesce into, or separate from still lives at a certain point during the making of the work.

Louisa Chambers’ Split (2020), bright as birthday wrapping paper, pops up its new hybrid geometry on a pale blue-grey ground like a harlequin playground fortune teller, while Matthew Macaulay’s acrylic on paper painting Edges (2019) abuts ochre, blue and red passages to create a tight composition.

Maja Rohwetter presents glitch-scattered collage work, hoovering up fragments from accelerated virtual realms and painting it slowly onto the page. Louise Bristow renders miniature set pieces, perpetually interchangeable cardboard stage flats and cut-outs back into the two-dimensional.

Working a spellbound nightshift, Niina Lehtonen Braun’s brush-wielding artist conjures up an illuminated trance in Blue Haired Painter: Untitled (You are a good faithful little beast) (2023) in a room strewn with aesthetic detritus, a dream-infested kitchen with washing hanging on a black line and yellow daisies in a vase.

Thinking of the bare canvas or clean paper each artist started out with, and the process of making these blank supports into artworks, calls to mind that a friend once told me about the dream she had the night before she flew to India for the first time.

In anticipation of the trip, her somnolent brain hastily assembled a Spartan white room, barely furnished with a low white table and a couple of featureless chairs, possibly a white sideboard. When she woke up that was all she remembered – a blank white room. She took it that the excitement of the eagerly anticipated journey, and of the richly coloured, patterned world she would see when she stepped off the plane, meant that her mind could not compute.

Or was it that her mind was busy at work while she slept, decluttering, setting up a receptively neutral space in her head so that she could assimilate as much as possible of the culture that she would imminently be experiencing? So that an impression of everything she saw around her when she got there could be accommodated, and all the various objects would have a place?

The artist’s studio is the place where raw canvases, sheets of paper, yet unmarked engraving plates, photographic paper, or slabs of clay, are the blank surfaces upon which the creative act involved in making an artwork takes place. Likewise, a gallery (at least in the modern and contemporary tradition) is typically white walled. One exhibition comes down; the walls are cleared, touched up and repainted before each new exhibition is installed. A clean slate, a tabula rasa: and then the art begins.

In his current and recent work, ‘Objects’ co-curator and director of PAPER Gallery Manchester, David Hancock uses a wooden box, purpose-made to contain the elements of a still-life or tableau that he wishes to paint. He sets up the diorama in his studio, with items such as ceramic figures and vessels, magazine cut-outs, houseplants, placed alongside dolls bought for the purpose, which are supplied blank so that the purchaser can paint faces on them and dress them in whatever fabrics and clothes they like. In the paintings, the figure becomes another object. Part decorative, part symbolic, these figures-as-objects enact a scenario where the artist’s studio might turn out to be a surrealist’s dream, and the doll avatars could pass as cinematic icons from a bygone age or antique gods reborn.

The artists showing in ‘Objects’ all live and work in the UK or Berlin; all seek to disrupt and reinterpret the notion of still life. In various ways, they use the concept of still life to create new realms, inviting the viewer to inhabit a new topography. Arrangements and montages of objects, fabricated specially or appropriated from daily life, come together from disparate but allied sources to be constructed into a previously unseen reality.

Louisa Chambers, resident artist at Primary, Nottingham and a third of Paint Party, a group set up to advocate and celebrate contemporary painting practices, graduated in Painting at the Royal College of Art in 2007 and is a Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University. Split (2020) typifies her current work as a painting which begins with a simple paper folded form out of which she has constructed a temporary model before rendering it back into a flat two-dimensional space by making a painting of it. In Split, the patterned paper overflows its boundaries (a little awkwardly). But the artist overrides the viewer’s expectation that the red diamond shapes are part of the pattern by extending them into the background. Pictorial logic is at the behest of the artist.

It’s a reminder that as an artist you basically have no rules. The rules are yours to make up and break up. The colours, as Chambers points out, ‘divert from the original paper models and instead are intuitively selected during the painting process.’ Chambers describes her work as ‘abstracted still life’ and cites architectural sources for her patterns. In this way the conveyor belt of motifs that makes up daily life (‘such as walls, fences, floors or rooftops… memorised from daily encounters such as from walks made locally or further afield’) are fed into the work, repurposed in closely focused juxtapositions of colour and geometric shape that offer new, previously unseen images.

Matthew Macaulay, who studied Fine Art and Painting at Coventry, also brings the outside world – landscape, cityscape – into the still life. He is intrigued by creative tensions and balance and equivalence between ‘paintings that are full of activity and paintings that are almost void of any kind of information,’ as he described to Bruce Asbestos at Trade Gallery a few years ago. His painting Edges (2019) occupies a position between still life and landscape, layering yellow, blue and brown depths that hover above a riverine violet-blue strip. He could have been looking at a detail of a piece of furniture. But with his mind elsewhere, running by water alongside walled fields. In his descriptions of his process, he speaks of applying colour and then responding to what he has laid down and building up the painting from there. Edges seems intuitive and unplanned, as if executed in a dream state.

Maja Rohwetter lives and works in Berlin and studied Fine Arts, Romance Studies and Philosophy at the University of Osnabrück, the Royal College of Fine Arts in Stockholm and HdK Berlin. Working with scraps of imagery ‘on the fringes, in the transition zones and side scenes’, Rohwetter states in an interview with Miriam Bers for Axel Obiger: ‘I am particularly interested in forms that I cannot name or identify. Correspondences, convergences or irritations then arise in the combination, and from this arise the pictorial ideas.’

Gemischte Gefühle [Mixed Feelings] #7 (2019) is one of a series of collages by Rohwetter that tap into a ‘more emotional, non-linguistic level’ of existence. Using fragments from our deconstructed experience of the real world, Rohwetter recreates that experience in collage: ‘We are collectors of fragmented bits of space that we assemble into a world view. Like tourists, we tend to interpret surface structures as places.’ As with the other artists in ‘Objects’, the artist invites the viewer into the work, into the image, to look around at the elements they have put together. Each work invites contemplation and the possibility of transcendence.

Louise Bristow, who studied painting at Gloucestershire College of Arts and Technology and printmaking at Brighton University, is co-director of East Side Print CIC, a screen print studio in Brighton. She is interested in the design and form of the built environment and how that communicates the values of the society that made it. She explores how people build things in different ways according to cultural specifics. In Sketch for Energy Ritual (2016) a grove of slender trees is a backdrop for a billboard of stylised logo-like eyes in blue and yellow, and a stage-flat industrial landscape. The framework of an architectural model and a group of sepia figures cut from photographs stand in front, casting blue shadows on the shallow cream ground. All this is painted, again, like Louisa Chambers’ Split, with the two-dimensional source elements creating a three-dimensional display that is then painted back into two dimensions.

Finnish artist and performer Niina Lehtonen Braun studied at the Helsinki Art Academy and the Ecole Nationale Supérieur des Beaux-Arts Paris, and lives and works in Berlin. Examining the roles and expectations of women, her work deals with the fear of failure, guilt and sorrow, giving a voice to mothers, daughters, partners, friends and artists. She is also a member of the performance group JOKAklubi. In her collaged painting Blue Haired Painter: Untitled (You are a good faithful little beast) (2023), a domestic studio, with its crowded table and blotted blue sky outside, projects the thoughts of the woman sitting for her portrait. The painter hypnotises her sitter with her brush, painting what’s inside her head. The transformative power of painting to create new and previously unseen objects and realms is depicted here as a literal, narrative expression. The brush becomes a wand, around it a forcefield of power and agency.

In the foreground is the extended line up of objects that constitute an archetypical Lehtonen Braun still life: tea and coffee pots, sweet dishes and abandoned plates of food, a cloth doll and an open notebook of automatic writing, informal flower arrangements and stray plants. An artist’s incidental still life – the kind you might find in many a studio, that in some quiet shamanistic manner, aid the transformation of blanks into artworks, while outside the window the day has passed, and a blue dusk heralds the oncoming night, during which the industriousness of dreaming continues.