Exhibition “Luc Tuymans – Edith Clever” in Berlin | EUROtoday

WWhat do portray and theater should say about one another, what’s visible artwork and what’s performing artwork? Can these disciplines even talk with one another, or is one already over the hill whereas the opposite remains to be static inside its framework?

The well-known Belgian painter Luc Tuymans could have thought when he was requested by the Berlin Academy of Arts, of which he has been a member since 2018, whether or not he may think about a double exhibition with a member from one other part – and in that case, with which one. Tuymans, who as soon as referred to as his footage “authentic forgeries” as a result of he creates them primarily based on photographic fashions, invited Edith Clever. He knew and admired the good actress from the legendary Berlin Schaubühne ensemble round Peter Stein, particularly from the movies of Hans-Jürgen Syberberg. And she, the shy, scrupulous, endlessly demanding of herself and infrequently glad, a member of the Academy since 1993, accepted the provide and engaged in the dialogue.

She says nothing and but all the things

Tuymans stated with satisfaction that it was a “very dry exhibition,” which for him means: the humanities coexist, assert their sovereignty, and develop correspondences primarily based on their autonomy. Uncompromising as a precept that thrives on the power to endure contradictions: Edith Clever and Luc Tuymans have sought and located this dialectic, every in their very own approach. It relies on the overwhelming presence that his photos and their recorded recreation scenes radiate. The present, excellently supervised by curator Angela Lammert, captures the viewers with a sound set up in the lobby, for which Genoël von Lilienstern redesigned Edith Clever’s voice with its putting modulations utilizing AI expertise.

At the start in the Max Liebermann Hall, named after the president of the Prussian Academy of Arts from 1920 to 1933, who had his studio right here, Edith Clever seems out into the world: the everlasting face of tragedy. She says nothing and but all the things – solely with concentrated eyes, the delicate trace of a smile and the charisma of a way of life of artwork expertise. This silent “Cinematic Portrait” was taken in black and white by photographer Alex Salinas, a companion of Tuymans. With the face of Edith Clever, who doesn’t disguise her age, “at the end of her working years” it stands magnificently between the excessive partitions, whose battle injury was clearly marked after the renovation.

Men with out faces

For Luc Tuymans, who persistently questions historical past in his works, whether or not it is in regards to the Holocaust, Belgian colonialism or conservatism in the USA, these rooms with their checkered previous are after all a pleasant problem. Although figurative, however not clearly coded, hint components of violence and lucid layers of horror could be seen in his work.

A wool carpet measuring 800 × 1000 centimeters, made particularly for Berlin, refers back to the skylight development of the corridor of the previous Royal Academy in which it’s situated, and the size of the outdated ground plan. The sample is ornamental and aggressive and comes from a chair in which somebody was murdered. “Himmler” and “The Architect” – Albert Speer – are faceless males at Tuymans who now seem in the very constructing in which Albert Speer and his employees deliberate Hitler’s “World Capital Germania”. Newer photos reply to the Corona interval with large-format numbers, as does “The Stage,” which presents an empty stage in an natural coloration mixture of crimson, indigo and violet. Of course, nobody will step into their spotlights to recite verses by Euripides or Kleist – as Edith Clever does, who you may hear, intelligent, chic and truthful, in a specifically recorded recording from the Studio for Electro-Acoustic Music of the Academy of Arts.

A rediscovery is the six-hour movie “The Night” (1985) by Hans-Jürgen Syberberg (in a model abridged by Clever), which you’ll be able to’t let go of when you sit right down to this “dramatic monologue” and of the melancholic-heroic Clarity with which she sings the “Evening Song” by Matthias Claudius: “That’s how some things are, / That we laugh at with confidence, / Because our eyes don’t see them.” They come collectively right here from very distant, the phrases , which handed by way of the actress’s physique, and the our bodies that fell from speech, wordless in cruelty and atrocity. Really two family: Edith Clever depends on theater to fight the mass media leveling, whereas Luc Tuymans insists on portray in order to banish the every day flood of photos. It’s not simply price it, it is a pleasure that transcends borders.

“Luc Tuymans – Edith Clever”. Until November twenty sixth, Academy of Arts Berlin. No catalog.