Strange Wor(l)ds

STRANGE WOR(L)DS

How do colours relate to memory?

How does language relate to the world and how to make worlds with words?

Can the invisible, such as thoughts, atmospheres or pain, be grasped through art?

Gallery Crone Berlin cordially invites you to the opening of the exhibition ‚Strange Wor(l)ds‘ by Austrian artist Nikolaus Gansterer. On display is a comprehensive series of around forty works in which Gansterer visualizes thoughts, treatises, and theses of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein in the most diverse ways.

Over the past fifteen years, a loose group of artists, some networked, some acting independently, has formed that has redefined drawing and “liberated” it from paper. Nikolaus Gansterer is one of them, and he makes use of pretty much all of the means and techniques that make up what can be called “new drawing”. With filigree mobiles and wooden braids, he extends drawing into the three-dimensional. With performative actions, he makes the act of drawing tangible and allows the viewer to participate in its intuitive elemental force. With installation arrangements of diverse materials, he links line and sculpture. And in large, meticulously assembled display cases, he “draws” with randomly found or consciously collected objects, such as trash, scraps of paper, odds and ends—leaving paper, pen, and pencil behind.

But what characterizes Gansterer’s work above all and distinguishes it is the content aspect, which he transforms into the formal: in all his works, he refers to philosophy, literature, poetry, natural science, or his own knowledge processes. All works are made in resonance with theoretical treatises, scientific texts, experimental poems, well-known or forgotten novels, or statements on the state of the world, his own or those of others. He transfers them into new con-figurations, new figures of thought; he gives them form by asking about their potential to trans-form processes of thinking.

In the solo exhibition Strange Wor(l)ds, Gansterer now brings together over forty works in which he deals with the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s book „Philosophical Investigations“ (1953). As always in his work, that is characterized by meticulous research and playful lightness at the same time, he translates Wittgenstein’s thoughts and theses on the complex relation between language and reality into visual diagrams using a wide array of techniques, methods, and modes of production, in this case also frequently resorting to classical drawing. Sometimes the works are based on only single, short sentences from the Wittgenstein’s Investigations, sometimes on entire paragraphs or pages. Sometimes Gansterer takes up marginal aspects, sometimes core theses, and sometimes both.

The word “translating” in Gansterer’s art practice must not be misunderstood or seen as a servile gesture of one-to-one translation. When he “translates,” “transfers,” and “transforms” Wittgenstein’s texts into the pictorial, the tangible, this is not done in the sense of an illustration. Rather, through his drawings, collages and performances, he expands them, interprets them, delimits them, gives them a new dimension, a new aggregate state, opening up for a new modes of reception. Gansterer therefore rightly emphasizes that he is concerned—not only in the Wittgenstein project—with the subtle, ephemeral, fluid process that underlies his artistic production practice.

When he makes the drawings, when he goes into the studio or starts a performance, when he begins to translate a theoretical, scientific or intellectual source into a pictorial work, he becomes completely immersed with this source, absorbs it as if in a meditative or even trance like state  of mind. By calming „logic consciousness“ he transforms the text, the thesis, the treatise from deepest intuition into the visual. While he reads it, while he hears it, the agency of the text, the thesis, the treatise draws through him–he does not draw it–rather he allows to be drawn by “it”.

As part of his artistic research project Contingent Agencies, Gansterer collaborates with philosophers and writers inquiring this “it” on the subject of human and non-human agencies (German: Wirkkräfte). Again in highly concentrated sessions, Gansterer attempts to record, for example, the agencies of the wind or the sounds and its relation to a specific atmosphere through drawing and performance. Gansterer asks: How to notate something that is per se fleeting and complex, without fixing „it“, reducing or simply re-presenting it, yet allowing multiple accesses and points of contact as a contingent present sign? The exhibition “Strange Wor(l)ds” now brings also these groups of drawings adressing the manifold agencies of the world around us together for the first time.

In this way, Gansterer’s work touches not only on Wittgenstein’s philosophical legacy, which he deals with directly in Strange Wor(l)ds, but also on that of Jacques Derrida and Jean Baudrillard. With his approach to the non-conscious, and the works that grow out of it, he questions the validity of theses and realities and at the same time underpins them in the sense of post-structuralism. Everything, as his drawings, performances, diagrams, mobiles, and installations want to tell us, is inherent in a fluid, constantly changing process, everything eludes definition, everything evaporates, nothing is valid anymore. The determination, the validity can only lie in the acceptance of the withdrawing, the evaporating, the “on the one hand and so on the other hand”. Or precisely in its visualization, as Gansterer succeeds so subtly and at the same time so consistently in his processual and intuitive art—in the manifestation of the non-manifest, if you will. In the materialization of the non-material. In the clear form of the blurred.

For almost three years, Nikolaus Gansterer has worked on his Wittgenstein series, accompanied by the Austrian philosopher Klaus Speidel. This dialogue also resulted in their joint book ‚Playing with Ludwig / Jouer avec Ludwig‚ (Editions Dilecta, 2022) which will be presented as part of the exhibition ‚Strange Wor(l)ds‘ on Saturday, January 21, 2023 at 4 pm. 
The afternoon begins with a discussion between Nikolaus Gansterer, Klaus Speidel and the drawing expert Jan-Philipp Frühsorge. Afterwards, Gansterer and Speidel invite you to the first public Berlin Language Game Lab, in which they will work with drawings and objects based on a remark by Ludwig Wittgenstein, resulting in an installation that takes up the methodology of “Playing with Ludwig”. Galerie Crone, Motto Books and Éditions Dilecta cordially invite you to attend.

NIKOLAUS GANSTERER: STRANGE WOR(L)DS
Opening: Fri, 20 Jan 2023, 7 – 9 pm
Book Launch & Artist Talk: Sat, 21 Jan 2023, 4 – 5:30 pm
Exhibition on view: Jan 21 – March 4, 2023
Opening Hours: Tue – Sat, 11 am – 6 pm
Gallery Crone Berlin, Fasanenstraße 29, 10719 Berlin