JAN KÖCHERMANN
Mokkelbosts Keller November 11, 2022 - January 21, 2023 Whether on a large scale as a walk-in installation or as small miniature worlds: The artist Jan Köchermann cultivates a playful approach to various types of consciously and unconsciously perceived transitions. To this end, his art continuously works on various thresholds - between inside and outside, private and public, science and fiction, dystopia and utopia. The space created in each case becomes a stage and setting for stories. Sometimes dystopian with a view of a barren room and a raging snowstorm outside the windows, sometimes dreamlike with a fictitious mountain landscape as an oversized backdrop and intervention in the public space at Hansaplatz in Berlin. The solo exhibition at Galerie Mathias Güntner (Knesebeckstraße 90, Berlin) opens on November 11 and focuses on some of these different kinds of experiential spaces in Köchermann's work - an art experience from the pragmatically reduced large-scale to the detail-loving small-scale. While visitors are often confronted with a threatening abyss as a boundary in Köchermann's walk-in objects, the abysmal can also be found in a less literal sense in his smaller works. Poetic stories take place in these impressively small-scale spaces. An important element in Köchermann's artistic concepts is the activation of the viewer, who - as in the walk-through tunnel works - must either stand in the middle of it themselves or engage in a private experience with the work by looking into one of his miniature worlds. There is always a formal fragility to the stories of his in-between worlds, which deliberately sabotages the perfect staging. After all, they are always backdrops that can easily be exposed as fiction. The viewer's imagination is needed to enliven the fragile illusions. Text: Anna Linder
Mokkelbosts Keller November 11, 2022 - January 21, 2023 Whether on a large scale as a walk-in installation or as small miniature worlds: The artist Jan Köchermann cultivates a playful approach to various types of consciously and unconsciously perceived transitions. To this end, his art continuously works on various thresholds - between inside and outside, private and public, science and fiction, dystopia and utopia. The space created in each case becomes a stage and setting for stories. Sometimes dystopian with a view of a barren room and a raging snowstorm outside the windows, sometimes dreamlike with a fictitious mountain landscape as an oversized backdrop and intervention in the public space at Hansaplatz in Berlin. The solo exhibition at Galerie Mathias Güntner (Knesebeckstraße 90, Berlin) opens on November 11 and focuses on some of these different kinds of experiential spaces in Köchermann's work - an art experience from the pragmatically reduced large-scale to the detail-loving small-scale. While visitors are often confronted with a threatening abyss as a boundary in Köchermann's walk-in objects, the abysmal can also be found in a less literal sense in his smaller works. Poetic stories take place in these impressively small-scale spaces. An important element in Köchermann's artistic concepts is the activation of the viewer, who - as in the walk-through tunnel works - must either stand in the middle of it themselves or engage in a private experience with the work by looking into one of his miniature worlds. There is always a formal fragility to the stories of his in-between worlds, which deliberately sabotages the perfect staging. After all, they are always backdrops that can easily be exposed as fiction. The viewer's imagination is needed to enliven the fragile illusions. Text: Anna Linder