Kleintierzuchtverein AG (Small Animal Breeding Club Inc.)
28 April to 23 June 2007
At the entrance, two copper doves hang by a silken thread and float slowly through the air. Behind them, on a dark green blackboard wall, an idyllic-looking landscape in a golden frame is displayed, crowned by a trophy and surrounded by the signs of struggle. One room further on there are moving scenes or fragments of an existence behind bars that let us look deep behind so-called “perfect worlds”.
“Kleintierzuchtverein AG” (Small Animal Breeding Club Inc.) is the title of this special exhibition at Red Corridor Gallery, currently on view at Löherstraße 19 in Fulda. On show are works by the artist group Red Corridor and its members Rudi Neuland, Joanna Skurska and Leszek Skurski, who, together with the artists Nadine Röther, Tatiana Urban, Veronika Zyzik and Alexander Zyzik, have devoted themselves to the theme of the “small animal breeding club” as a kind of metaphor. Using different artistic media, from painting and photography to sculpture and installation, they show their individual artistic positions around the subject or its cage: at times shocking or gentle, at times direct and allusive, at times sensual or threatening, at times abstract or representational.
Much is hinted at or spoken out, uncovered or concealed in their works, and much is questioned: “Is what we see and experience every day a filtered reality that we are supposed to accept at face value?” is one of the questions the artists ask, or: “Is there a parallel to the dear little animals that are lovingly bred only to end up on the table? Are we in a cage of arbitrariness in which we feel that everything is regulated, ordered and prescribed, only to find in the end that this is a huge fallacy?” In this figurative sense, the exhibition is by no means about small animal breeding clubs as such, but rather about society and its constraints, about discipline and order, social injustice, power or its abuse, and much more.
When the artist Rudi Neuland places six rabbit hutches at the centre of his work, he fills them with content and questions about unemployment, religion and poverty, or modern education, among other things. When he hangs scenes of a life behind bars around them, places fabulous creatures on plinths or brings tortures onto the canvases, he shows much that is fragmentary and composite, much feathered, impaled or burnt, and much that adorns itself with borrowed plumes: not only cowards and despots but also torture rabbits or Prada shoes appear here as symbols of social injustice or crimes worldwide.
The painter Leszek Skurski engages in his pictures with discipline and order, security, lies and manipulation. On a monumental board, a landscape framed in gold appears at a central point, clearly linked to past traditions and yet, on closer inspection, offering something surprising, something unexpected. Next to it, a camera watches over the habitat of a small creature “for security”, while on the other side a densely packed group of young people points, in their uniformity, to certain constraints or dangers. And this above all in view of the dictator outlined in red, who wears two Dürer hares and the instruction “Find your proper hobby”.
For Joanna Skurska it is, among other things, the breeding of beauty and its consequences, but also the truth behind outward appearance, which is expressed on various levels in pictures and objects. The dove, the symbol of peace and love, appears with a wiry, grid-like body or as a shadow of itself in a series of pictures capturing different moments of flight, while on the floor the reverse side of its presence gathers in clear traces.
At the centre of Nadine Röther’s work is the rabbit, more precisely the fighting rabbit: a very contrasting or contradictory creature, here assembled from small pieces of wood and studded with staples, appearing several times: once upright, then lying on the ground, and finally hung on the wall as a trophy. The painter Alexander Zyzik chooses a different angle on small animal breeding, depicting the blood-red tumult of a cockfight and taking up the golden victory in pigeon shooting. In contrast, Veronika Zyzik points in her animal studies and the dove picture to something precious and gentle, while Tatiana Urban shows, in reduced colour, two men in protective suits in front of locked compartments.
As in the gallery’s last special shows, “August B.”, “Stattmesse” and “Porträt”, the artist group again engages critically with its theme and presents various artistic positions in a kind of total work of art. This also applies to the next exhibition, entitled “Sommernachtsphantasien” (Midsummer Night Fantasies), which will be on view in the gallery’s rooms from 30 June to 13 October 2007. In addition, the artist group is planning two larger projects on the theme “Work and Art”, devoted to “Art and Corporate Culture” and to “the Long-Term Unemployed and Art”, among other things in studies, workshops and exhibitions.