Michael Bauch, Anne-Lise Coste, Slawomir Elsner, Franziska Furter, Clare Goodwin, Bob Gramsma, Sebastian Hammwöhner, Pierre Haubensak, Mirjam Blanka Inauen, Anna Krammig, Anne Morgenstern, Valentina Pini, Sebastian Utzni
We are delighted to welcome you to the group exhibition Surprise, Surprise! This is the hundredth exhibition in our gallery. Our colleague Anna Konstantinova drew our attention to this anniversary. We seize this opportunity to take a look back at some moments in the history of the gallery.
The adventure began 16 years ago in January 2008 with the soft opening of the print exhibition ‘Dedicated’, which already hinted at the gallery owners' passion for works on paper. In the first solo exhibition, we showed works by the well-known English sculptor Bill Woodrow. This was followed by a series of exhibitions with artists from Berlin, including Florian Baudrexel, Sebastian Hammwöhner and Sophia Schama. In addition to the established painter positions of Michael Bauch, Pierre Haubensak, Uwe Wittwer and Klodin Erb, emerging artists such as Benedikte Bjerre, Mamiko Otsubo, Motoko Dobashi and David Hominal were repeatedly featured.
We paid great attention to the Swiss artists Anna Amadio, Edit Oderbolz and Franziska Furter. We made a statement at Art Basel with an installation of flowers by Gitte Schäfer. The artist couple wiedemann/mettler staged their works in the gallery with a sure sense of space. Franziska Furter set filigree graphic and sculptural accents in several solo exhibitions. Clare Goodwin continued to develop her concept of constructive nostalgia in her abstract paintings and ceramics and surprised us 2023 in a stunning exhibition with large assemblage sculptures. In the K3 exhibition space run by Clare Goodwin and her partner Sandi Paucic, we discovered the abstract art of Mirjam Blanka Inauen. Sebastian Utzni took us on a journey into his fantastic conceptual visual worlds in several presentations. Anne-Lise Coste amazed us with ever new poetic pictorial inventions, including word works and spray paintings on loose canvas and on paper. The performance artist San Keller repeatedly appeared in the gallery like a satellite. With his coloured pencil drawings, Slawomir Elsner gave us a new perspective on the art of the Old Masters, which he complemented with colourful watercolours. The works of Valentina Pini and Bob Gramsma expanded our ideas of sculpture and with the photographs of Anne Morgenstern and Solène Gün we entered new curatorial territory thanks to the input of Anna Konstantinova. With Anna Krammig's figurative painting, we are presenting a new discovery in Surprise, Surprise!
In between the solo exhibitions, we repeatedly interspersed group exhibitions with selected titles such as ‘Liminal Moments’, ‘No Condition is Permanent’, ‘When the facts change, I change my mind’, ‘With Other Eyes’ and ‘Suspense’.
In 2020, we expanded the gallery and were now able to hold up to three solo exhibitions at the same time. In the enlarged space, Franziska Furter proved to be an excellent curator and invited four artists to respond to their own works in her exhibition ‘Landscape with Landscape’. In the exhibition ‘A Floating World’, we showed positions in four rooms by four artists, Pierre Haubensak, Jamie Isenstein, Sebastian Utzni and Klodin Erb, whose art could not be more different, and yet the show formed a harmonious whole. Again and again, we reinvented ourselves with the help of the artists and had surprises in store in the exhibitions.
The exhibition runs until 15 February 2025.