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Guided tour of the exhibition Maribor Project / Rebecca Horn & Guests
UGM | Maribor Art Gallery, Strossmayerjeva 6
Saturday, 29 September 2012 at 11:00
guided by: Breda Kolar Sluga, director of UGM and guest artists
Guided tour will be held in English.

The exhibition Maribor Project / Rebecca Horn & Guests is more than just a comprehensive retrospective of Rebecca Horn`s oeuvre. It is designed as an intercultural project that includes not only the works of renowned German artist Rebecca Horn but intertwines them with selected works of further fine art artists, thus establishing more and less direct references and entanglements between different generations, cultural contexts and artistic expression. Rebecca Horn invited Matthias Deumlich (1962), Ali Kaaf (1977), Antonio Paucar (1973), Jakob Schaible (1978) and Markus Wüste (1970) to showcase their most recent and prominent art works within the framework of her own retrospective. Employing different material and techniques, all five artists have developed a strong individual artistic language in order to reflect their subjective perception of aesthetic, societal and historical subject matters. Carefully selected and positioned by the artist herself, the exhibition thus visualizes and emphasizes the multifaceted and interconnected layers of material and aesthetic references between works. Markus Wüste creates sculptures from traditional material like graphite or marble but forms objects and adds features, which appear in contrast with the conventional themes of sculpture: a granite turntable that plays its own medium, a common plastic water bottle out of blue pearl stone or a 300kg-marble sculpture that depicts the (de)formation of its own gravity. His utmost aim is to free and puzzle with the hidden potential of various types of stone. Ali Kaaf engages in paper, photography and most recently in glass to examine, challenge and depict the nature of material and immaterial erosion as well as material and symbolic resistance. Both concepts serve as access points of his works and take him through various stages of transformation, decay and revival: his media gets burnt, painted, collaged and morph into dense portraits or sculptures of time and abstraction - an artistic manifestation of a very personal approach to oneself. Jakob Schaible´s works are largely based on the idea of oscillation, pulsation and rhythm. His media are salt, pigments, water, sound, light and movement. He uses them to pay attention to, fixate and visualize nature’s and men’s universal cosmic forces as he translates them on a sheet of paper, on a structured field of canvas, on the surface of a projection screen or simply within the form of a circle. Matthias Deumlich concentrates on sound, movement and how both relate to and translate into kinetic sculptures. His works are mostly large scale multimedia installations that are designed to employ day to day objects, which conduct abstract poetic action of various kind: common plastic cups are ringing beautiful sounds, upright positioned bread is pierced with a video, a glass container holds water which flies into rage and paints a magnificent shadow on a wall. Antonio Paucar emphasizes action and process in his works by focusing predominately on performance art and its documentations. He foregrounds masterly what is inherent in all of the other artists works: the intensity of the processuality and the beauty of sensibility towards nature, human beings and the universe: through the sensitive power of his breath, Paucar forms culturally rich patterns out of drinking straws against a wall by poetically filling his lucid wall architecture with red wine. Thus, the exhibition combines works of a variety of media, photography, films and video, drawings, collages, performance and various sculptures from six artists that not only vary in media, but also in artistic approach, cultural and generational context, and sources of inspiration. What the body of works has in common and what speaks to Rebecca Horn’s oeuvre is their sensibility towards material, time, space and human perception. All artworks succeed in the creation of an aesthetic surface that is lightheartedly deep in meaning and intense in perception.

FREE ENTRY! YOU ARE KINDLY INVITED!