Britta Rettberg

[…] I have always taken pleasure in the fact that the Mosai Sinci lexicon contains the remarkable word ‘Zharroktal.’ Precisely because it has no meaning, it became a popular filler in youth slang: a rhetorical gesture used to express the frustration that something cannot be articulated in one’s own language – perhaps because it is too complex, too tangled, too contradictory, or too new. I now read the word in violet letters across the ruins of the city and realize that logic will not carry me any further. My path leads inward, into the shadowed terrain of paraconsistency […] – Paul Valentin: ‘Formula’ (2023-today) [LINK text='Paul Valentin' href='https://brittarettberg.com/artist/paul-valentin/']

Through a wide array of materials and techniques, Lennart Lahuis subjects visual information to natural processes such as oxidation, combustion, evaporation, and erosion. The artist juxtaposes these natural phenomena in each series with technological elements and scientific disciplines such as earth sciences and astronomy. In his objects and installations Lahuis departs from transience and entropy to explore the boundaries of intelligibility and the material conditions for readability. "Small Language Models" brings together two bodies of work that ground the reproduction of information in natural processes and the body.

Caro Jost (b. 1965 in Munich, Germany, lives and works in Munich/New York) collects traces of the past through a conceptual approach, in which the appropriation of marginal stories and memories and their transfer into a contemporary context play a central role. Drawing on a complex archive of materials, she transfers found fragments onto canvas and deconstructs their meaning through commentary, manipulation, and alienation. In this way, she immortalizes past events and creates historical documents. Caro Jost started her ongoing series “INVOICE PAINTINGS” in 2016 as part of her research on former artist studios in NYC. Archival materials used with permission, such as personal documents, invoices or sketches of Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt, Elaine deKooning and others are appropriated as witnesses of a time. In Jost’s view, these items documenting purchases of paints and materials both register the near-time genesis of important artworks and are finds that function as means of creating artworks of her own. “Caro Jost often traces the past of others in her work. The archives of well-known artists, pictures of their studios or even their material bills become objects in her works. Marginal histories and memories play a central role. She appropriates things that seem ephemeral, for the most part perhaps they are, giving the incidental a physicality without being nostalgic or worshipful. Rather, it is her way of listening and looking closely that characterizes her engagement with the objects. This creates conversations that contain Jost’s reflection, but also testify to the material’s resistance.” (Dr. Monika Bayer-Wermuth, Museum Brandhorst, Munich, 2022). Furthermore, Jost incorporates excerpts from magazines, essays, newspaper headlines, and snippets of conversation. These text fragments, as testimonies of a zeitgeist, are removed from their original context and integrated into works that revolve around themes such as freedom, personal responsibility, or the relationship to oneself and others. While Jost’s work is rooted in the traditions of painting and collage, the techniques she employs result in works with complex compositions and messages. The resin-coated pieces break away from the two-dimensionality of painting and become textured reliefs or objects.