
ANYS REIMANN
31 MAR. – 17 MAY 2023
‘Fresh from the Aquarius source of inspiration in the truest sense of the word.’
With these words, Anys Reimann describes the starting point of her new exhibition Dawn of Aquarius – a journey through inner and outer worlds of images, through longing, memory and transformation.
Reimann works with collage, painting and sculpture, often simultaneously, in layers, in hints, with superimpositions. Her pictures sometimes emerge intuitively and emotionally, sometimes from a concrete cultural-historical or pop-cultural motif – but often also from a free, associative process in which feelings and thoughts are expressed physically. The results are multi-layered pictorial figures – idiosyncratic, beautiful, vulnerable, ironic or melancholic creatures reminiscent of fairy-tale characters, archetypes, dreams. Or of ourselves.
The exhibition title picks up on a spiritual-astrological concept: the so-called Age of Aquarius. In Astrosophy, it is seen as the beginning of a new, collective phase in which old relationships of violence, authoritarian systems and alienation are overcome. Instead, a togetherness is to emerge – a new consciousness: from ‘I to We’. Harmony, transformation, mutual trust. Perhaps that sounds trusting. Perhaps that is precisely why it is so powerful.
Reimann remembers the beginning of Milos Forman’s film Hair (1979) – the song Aquarius, which left her with a
lasting feeling of hope, freedom and community. A promise. A departure. She quotes:
„…Harmony and understanding
Sympathy and trust abounding
No more falsehoods or derisions
Golden living dreams of visions
Mystic crystal revelation
And the mind’s true liberation
Aquarius! Aquarius!“
Just as the song creates a utopian image of the world, Reimann’s works also tell of possible futures – not loudly, not boldly, but through allusions, questions and connections. Works such as The Fool (on the hill), A Midsummernight’s Dream or Melt (weeping men) cannot be clearly categorised. They oscillate between seriousness and irony, between tribute and reconsideration. Some seem like dream sequences, others like snatched scenes from history, viewed through the filter of the now.
In the exhibition, we encounter the Queen of the Night (sitting in the backseat of my Cadillac) – a figure between opera and street, between glamour and everyday life. And the work Mae (Homage to Richter) makes no secret of her artistic engagement with role models, with history, with painting itself.
Behind all this lies a genuine interest in people – in our feelings, contradictions, masks, injuries and possibilities. Reimann looks closely. And she looks further. ‘Hommages, melancholy, irony and hope … seeing new, different and further,’ she says herself.
Perhaps the Age of Aquarius does not begin on a specific date. Perhaps it begins within us – with an idea, an
image, an encounter.
Unfortunately, the majority of contemporary art, which likes to see itself as ‘political’ and ‘activist’, takes the Brechtian model as its role-model and has manoeuvred itself – with this as the means and end – into a dead end. Activism has been freewheeling for years: without any prospect of change for the better, especially as far as politics is concerned, which this type of art likes to think it is. Seen in the light of day, the hammer and mirror from Brecht’s model are easy to recognise as two equally false alternatives. The unreflected act, even if it comes from the most radical representatives of contemporary art, is no better than reflection without consequences. Moreover, the field of artistic possibilities extends far beyond the polarity of hammer and mirror. This field contains expertise for problems that many people probably don’t even know exist. And it is precisely such problems that hold solutions that allow manoeuvrability, even for those who are stuck in a dead end.
Let’s turn to the lamp. We have known since the days of Diogenes that there can never be enough light. This is all the more true when current conditions are characterised by a consciousness that, according to Peter Sloterdijk’s old formula, is ‘enlightened’ but still ‘wrong’. All the better if the lamp of choice is not only an illuminant, but also radiates its well-informed knowledge into the world on topics such as masks, tourism and migration as the light and dark side of modern mobility, cinema or even the costs of colonialism.
Anyone who thinks of hammer, mirror and lamp not first of all as art, but as questions of interior design, is actually right. Claus Föttinger is an expert in interior design, who combines hammer, mirror and lamp in a practical way to create an aesthetic model in its own right. It is a model in the fine tradition of the Trojan horse, which looks harmless but is not.
Föttinger lets his Trojans circulate in the form of an artistic work that would be underestimated by anyone who thought it was ‘just’ furniture – because the artist’s favourite formats like to take the form of lamps, illuminated wall boards, illuminated tables and stools or – his main metier – radiant bar ensembles that create their very own atmospheric conditions and where tea and champagne taste good.
It is very appropriate to understand Föttinger’s objects and installations, which balance beauty and purpose, as ‘social media’: They only really develop their artistic value when they are put to use – whether as a large bar or a small lamp – in an ideally communal way, aimed at exchange. (In this respect, Föttinger’s approach is not so far removed from Brecht’s hammer. It’s just that he has voluntarily „pulled the tooth“ of the dogmatic, do-gooder attitude of someone who always knows best what is good for everyone else. And the mirror is also on board, from which I like to have it reflected back to me that perhaps I’m not as great as always assumed – provided I look into it critically enough).
In his current exhibition, Föttinger is not focussing on the big picture, the whole and the complete, but on the building blocks, the individual elements and the structures connecting them in his artistic work, through which he has been working on two thematically equally important strands since the early 1990s: the social, which consists to a not insignificant extent of the jointly different; and how difference and connection – between materials, opinions and people – can be artistically choreographed, historically placed and contextually situated. There is no object that has not been informed by the artist’s extensive research into world- and visual cultures.
The fact that the lamp plays the leading role in this exhibition is fitting: whether in a monumental or an added form. The lamp is the object that, because it provides light in such a beautiful and functional way, creates a connecting structure between you and me and our surroundings – because only in the light can we look each other in the eye and then decide all the better whether we have understood each other or not.
Text by Hans-Jürgen Hafner
Photos by J. Bendzulla and VAN HORN | D. Steinfeld 2025
ANYS REIMANN | GALLERY EXHIBITIONS
31 MAR. – 17 MAY 2023
24 Jun. – 20 Aug. 2022