installation art – Crystal Ball Berlin

Installation/ Drawing

Vernissage, Saturday, September 7th. , 7pm

fridays from 3 to 7 pm, & after appointment, exhibition runs until Oktober, 18th.

Artist Talk on sunday, oktober, 6th at 4pm

James Beatham, Initial Sketch for an Ceramic Fountain, Berlin 2024

James Beatham’s artistic oeuvre encompasses drawing, ceramics, painting and objects. In multi-part installations, the artist combines all these expressions in one form and brings them into communication in diverse, imaginative arrangements. He creates model-like habitats or sets which, as miniaturized urban landscapes, reveal relations that are both meaningful and mysterious. They are constructed from mysterious objects, images, personal relics, poetic allusions and have a strong narrative quality. They in turn contain art, the impossible, the fictitious, perhaps literarily imagined, the future, which echoes in the interior as if in a reflection. Beatham’s means seem free and develop through their combination. Even the scales of the objects used are not uniform, so that the resulting worlds, surreally detached from everything, like space stations, simultaneously cite mythical and real places far removed from their known location. Some things seem to stand out of context like an incongruous souvenir, absurd but equally integrated, so that associations arise quite casually. Many of these small worlds have a fountain or even a fountain in common as the central object around which everything is arranged. The fountains are of different shapes and designs and can be seen as an image of the basic conditions of human settlements, dwellings and habitats. The artist also provides lighting and light. The rippling of the water, a natural sound, also acts as a logical argument. James Beatham thus creates places that seem alive. The presence of these works appears inviting. The artist dares to create a special simultaneity here. He allows the users of the water, the people and animals, to be absent. Through this void, he draws the viewer into his spaces and allows us to experience the landscape in our contemplation. In a similar way to model landscapes, we consider how we would live in it if it were adapted to our scale. At the same time, he throws us out through profanity and the use of the absurd – he places a manquette in our view and thus shows us the design-like, the unreal, the artificial, as the outside of things. In this challenge between inside and outside, these special compositions by the artist develop a dialectical sound that, animated by this extraordinary effect, can tell stories of creatures and people quite freely.
To accompany the installations, James Beatham is showing a series of new drawings and ceramic objects.

James Beatham drawing — James Beatham, option one, Drawing

Store

cover and shine through
Exhibition Opening on friday, 12.04.2024 at 7 pm

special opening times for Sellerie Weekend: Fr., 26.4 & Sa., 27.4., 15 bis 19 Uhr

Come and see the Crystal Ball Boutique for Sellerie Weekend

12.04.2024 – 10.05.2024

What is this about – is this a store, can you buy something here? Can you get information here? What’s actually going on with the window? The openings in the wall for light and fresh air, covered with curtains and blinds and curtains and curtains so that no one can see how we behave inside. Or sometimes we do. Then there’s a design intention or an aesthetic purpose or outdoor advertising. Or I stand behind the curtain and observe without being seen. The curtain is the membrane between my cell and the outside world, between the private and the public, the obvious and the hidden.

The artists Marion Bösen and Susanne Katharina Willand work with photography and with the strategies of their translations into other media. Marion Bösen often devotes her extensive printmaking oeuvre to phenomenological large sets and photographic series, which she transforms into series of screen prints or installative large surfaces. The artist collects images of objects in dysfunctional contexts, extraordinary situations in everyday urban life and everyday life and phenomena that may remain unexplained for the time being. The result is all kinds of collections, abandoned televisions, mattresses, dead birds and
rabbits, fruit and vegetables, spurned sandwiches. Or even the however failed or well-intentioned repair of stonework in the pavement of a pavement of a square in Sao Paulo. The rhythmic patterns and wallpaper patterns and wallpapers of vegetable crates, wigs, slices of bread or chicken eggs
– our entire multi-part world is revealed in Marion Boesen’s attentive attentive gaze. The isolated, simple object, the lifeless, lost animal body, but also the large sets that paint our everyday lives like modern still lifes, appear charged with an almost living presence.

Susanne Katharina Willand works in a similar field, she is interested in cloths, things,
stones, fields, mountains – landscape. In the artist’s current working method, the objects and scenes are translated into embroidery. She pays particular attention to the pattern, structure and spatiality of the shape. Thus the lines of the design of a commercially available drying towel, for example, are in its
state when the cloth is randomly thrown in its folds are Willands theme. In these distortions of the pattern, the artist uses the embroidery needle to evoke the actually absent three-dimensionality with the embroidery needle. She folds and arranges a tablecloth in such a way that a mountain landscape becomes tangible or she embroiders fine shadows into a cloth spread out flat in front of us so that it looks as if it has just been been crumpled up and was lying there unironed. The interest
in the oscillation of the difference between spatiality and surface is unmistakable, as is the
phenomenological collection, which she shares with Marion Bösen. In their joint exhibition at the Crystal Ball, the artists are showing an installation specially designed for the gallery, in which they work with
the shop window of the space.

Galerie Crystal Ball

Tag: installation art

James Beatham – Radiant Springs

Marion Bösen & Susanne Katharina Willand