9 April – 26 May 2024
Opening: Fri 19 April, 7 pm

Bild und Ton (Image and Sound) is the title of the joint exhibition by Alexander Horn (Mannheim) and Henrik Jacob (Berlin), which will open at Galerie Wolf & Galentz on 19 April 2024. Henrik Jacob’s solo exhibition Blue Balloon was on show at the gallery during the coronavirus crisis in 2019, and Alexander Horn has been involved in several group exhibitions at the gallery.
We would like to invite you to the opening on Friday, 19 April 2024 from 7 pm.

Modelling Clay, Music and AI

Henrik Jacob, who most often creates works in black and white modelling clay, will be showing an interactive installation at Wolf & Galentz consisting of drawings, stickers, clay pictures and clay records. He will use the latter to make the versatile material of modelling clay acoustically tangible and let it resound. The record needle makes its way through a thick layer of modelling clay, changing the material itself and at the same time the sound it produces. Every sound is unique.

A completely new series of modelling clay pictures will be shown whose origin from AI image templates remains clearly visible in the final works. Henrik Jacob has simply adopted the built-in errors of the image generators and integrated them into the pictures. In his plasticine image series Real Estate – House for Sale (2024), for example, detached houses from artificially generated property adverts are offered for sale to viewers with all their shortcomings: those who don’t mind half windows, floating bushes and external staircases leading to nowhere can buy a plasticine property for a low price.

Only the Rocks Remain and The Last One at the Party

Alexander Horn’s paintings are just about the size of a postcard – the edges are not cleanly cut, the panels are not the same size; some are portrait, some landscape formats. Hung in a row, they form a swelling and receding line. Both series, Only the Rocks Remain and The Last One at the Party, show full-length portrait heads, one in dark near-monochrome, the other in nuances between white and black. Strangely attractive and at the same time absent, introverted, the sitters look directly out of the picture or are turned into profile. The small formats force the viewer to look up close, the intensity of the encounter is inescapable. It remains unclear who these people are, but it seems as if they are looking into our innermost being. Beyond words, Alexander Horn tells of the indescribable – of being human and what remains when the party is over.
Kim Behm

Thematically central to Oona Hyland’s work is the forgotten and repressed, that which is hushed up, people who have been silenced. She is particularly interested in exploring artistic means that do not just depict the processual nature of forgetting and remembering, but rather bring it to life, lets us experience it.

Based on her preferred artistic media – printmaking, mokuhanga ( Japanese woodcut printing), cyanotype– the artist creates installative, kinetic works with drawing, sculpture and video, with which she attempts to make traumatisation representable and tangible through movement and narrative. She contrasts static and stillness – silence – with the dialogue that takes place in time and between people.

In her work Active Forgetting, for which the exhibition is named, she concerns herself with the institutional abuse in Irish mother and baby homes and the associated so-called Magdalene Laundries, where unmarried pregnant women were interned and coerced into perform forced labour (from the late 19th century until the 1990s). Many of the women and their children died in the homes, often from malnutrition. This has only been publicly addressed in Ireland since the 2010s. Oona Hyland’s own mother gave birth to her eldest brother in one such home, the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, Ireland, which was not talked about in her family for a long time.

CV

Oona Hyland studied Cinematography at Ballyfermot College of Further Education (BCFE) Dublin, Irish Art History at Trinity College Dublin (TCD, MPhil 2017) and Art Research and Collaboration at the Institute of Art Design + Technology Dublin (IADT, MA 2022). She has participated in numerous residencies in recent years, including Fundació Joan Miró, Agalab Amsterdam, BKN Sweden and Edition Basel. In 2021 she was shortlisted for the On Paper Print Award in Barcelona. In 2022 she received the DLR Emerging Artist Award in Dublin. In 2021 she was elected to the Royal Society of Painters/Printmakers in London. She is a member of Graphic Studio Dublin and 9 Dragonheads. Oona Hyland lives and works in Dublin.

The exhibition is supported by

Born and raised in Berlin, Klaus Jurgeit (1937–2017) remained closely connected to the city throughout his life and painted it in several fantastic series – among them the Berliner Hinterhöfe, Zimmer (and Punks).
In the early 1980s, Jurgeit began to paint Berlin interiors in watercolour on paper – rooms, often in squatted houses, sometimes also depicting their residents, who were sitting in their rooms. The pictures are compositionally convincing, excellent from an artistic standpoint, and with an astonishing attention to detail he has painted the entire interior with finesse and precision. Some of the works are veritable hidden object pictures, and there are always new discoveries to be made when looking at them.
In the same period – up until the 1990s – Jurgeit also painted backyards in Berlin. These are sometimes desolate places that, through painting them meticulously, suddenly become subjects worth depicting and contemplating. The paintings in both series are independent works of art and at the same time documents of the time – images of a bygone era.
A third series comprises portraits of punks whom Jurgeit met on the streets of Berlin and whom he asked to let him paint them.