Collaboration of Julian Opie and Caroline Raspé, in context of the exhibitions of "Time Space Architecture" parallel to the UIA (Union International des Architectes) and the Dokumenta 2002 in Berlin. In cooperation with Gallery Barbara Thumm. open from June 05 to August 05 2002
selection from the publication by Jovis Verlag:
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Rethinking: space time architecture
Rethinking: space time architecture
a dialogue between art and architecture
publisher: Staatliche Museen Berlin, BDA, Landesverband Berlin
idea and concept: Steffen Lehmann, Caroline Raspé
german / english
112 pages
with colored pictures
hardcover
format: 19,5 cm x 29,5 cm
Euro 25.80 sFr 43.80
ISBN 3-931321-69-x
Voices from the critics: Mark Prince at artforum.com
The urban panorama unraveling before you like a film: This tired phrase is revitalized by Julian Opie in the courtyards surrounding Barbara Thumm Gallery, where he has constructed a wraparound outdoor installation. His diagrammatic vinyl streetscapes manipulate a hand-me-down vocabulary of basic forms. Opie's earlier work turned on the ambiguity between Minimalist autonomy and functionality or signification; these pieces, however, pivot between total abstraction and total picture. Against the usual foil of a white-walled gallery, the vast surfaces and flat colors of the pictures tend to dissolve into the purity of the nonreferential, but in this textured setting the abstract/pictorial axis is a two-way street: The formulaic scenery comments on the recalcitrant Berlin architectural backdrop and vice versa. In the courtyard, fact and fiction blend and clash. One looks through swaying foliage at static tree signs; the road markings, like the sprocket holes on film, connect the pictures in pictorial terms, while the white corner pieces between the separate rectangles do the same sculpturally. As you walk from daylight into a dim passage and out again, the sequence switches from a sunlit highway to a nocturnal city to the half-light of a gas station at dusk. These contrasts are disquieting because the pictures stand for the inaccessibility of reality as much as they implicitly marvel at it. The mountains are ultramarine triangles, the sky a cyan square, but rather than being a modernist utopia, this is a vision of the homogenization of perception. The simplifications tacitly testify to complexity, to a world too dense to mentally accommodate. Nevertheless, I was later struck by the universality of the images despite their precisely judged limits. Suddenly, trains, tower blocks, and the passing traffic all look like fleshed-out components of an Opie picture.