OPEN END

(German text below)

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Petra Karadimas and Gabriele Künne use their respective media to interrogate a perception based on seemingly incidentally found urban scenarios, departing from details in urban environments and addressing the fragments of nature and landscape in the interstices of the city. 

 

Photographs of construction sites, wastelands, and transitory spaces are at the center of Petra Karadimas' investigation. Here, urban structures join in a planar way, overlapping and crossing one another. The images appear fleeting, sometimes unspectacular, and yet deliberately break with convention and visual habits. Often they only reveal themselves at second glance. 

 

For Gabriele Künne, objects and object systems, whose indeterminate and indeterminable forms develop out of urban experience, play an essential role. In the field of tension between natural and technoid-architectural elements, a variety of associations open up to the viewer. Rolled-out surfaces of ceramic mass are folded, thrown, beaten, and pushed to the limits of their constructive possibilities.

 

The two artists share a similarly open approach to their work, always considering the conditions of the respective medium and understanding them as the actual starting point. Beyond the utilitarian or picturesque, the resulting works playfully disclose information about the processes and possibilities of their creation. The preceding dialogue is included as a form of presentation without disregarding the autonomy of the artworks.

 

Petra Karadimas studied fine arts at Hunter College of the City University of New York (M.F.A. 1995). In addition to her artistic activities, she has been a guest lecturer at the ICP in New York and has also directed the project space berg19 raum für fotografie in Berlin Mitte for several years. She has received numerous scholarships, most recently a grant from the Stiftung Kunstfonds Bonn. She has lived in Berlin since 1997.

 

Gabriele Künne studied fine arts at the Berlin University of the Arts and at the Royal College of Art London, graduating as a master student in 1998. Since 2012 she has also been curating as a member of Axel Obiger, most recently for "Amorph" at Galerie im Saalbau, Neukölln (2020) and "Patience of Paper" at PAPER gallery Manchester (2022). She has lived and worked in Berlin since 1988.​