SAME DIFFERENCE Exhibition in Berlin

Announcing my first exhibition in Berlin since 2004. Exciting times. Well I’m excited. Do please pass this invite on to your Berlin friends. I’d love to meet them. I will be in the gallery a good deal from 19th November up to and including 24th November. I’ve bought some new paper so will be painting away.

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SAME DIFFERENCE

an exhibition of art by Ben Coode-Adams & Jakob Roepke

Galerie dreiZehn

Knesebeckstr. 13 10623 Berlin

Opening 18.00-20.00 Friday 18th November 2016
figurecut-001-version-2Ben Coode-Adams and Jakob Roepke go to work every day making art. People need tangible images not just ideas. Roepke and Coode-Adams have been providing satisfying images for people to put in their homes and workplaces for a long time. This kind of workmanlike dedication has amazing consequences. It produces richness and depth – little explosions of magic. You know, that feeling when art really touches you in a way you can’t explain, because it’s not about words but visual intelligence. You can appreciate it with your eyes and that strange part of your brain.

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Owl Gods  Ben Coode-Adams W85cm x H66cm watercolour on paper 2015

Ben Coode-Adams is an artist, from rural Essex, North East of London where he lives and works on the family blackcurrant farm (Schwarze Johannisbeere). For most of his career he produced large scale public sculptures alongside a drawing practice. In 2013 he fell ill. Unable to produce sculptures he turned to making watercolours which led to exhibitions in New York, London and Essex. For Coode-Adams’ painting involves a quantum delving into the spirit world from which a host of spectral personages flood onto the page. Veils of beautiful colour coalesce and oscillate, spun from ‘the lower world’ in which lurk truth and beauty.

Jakob Roepke is an artist, who has lived and worked in Berlin for many years. In 1996 he began a series of 13x12cm collages based on Jiu Jitsu and Yoga manuals. The protagonists in these collages are often caught in life-threatening circumstances, wrestling crocodiles or each other. Alongside these collages he makes austere abstract reliefs. In a more fluid mode he uses silhouette paper and scissors to make detailed organic cutouts. For Roepke these bodies of work, of fixed parameters, record the slipping between the on-and-on-ness of it all, and the profound newness of every day.

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untitled (numbered)  Jakob Roepke from the Collage Series, 13×12 cm, Gouache, Ink on Paper, 1996-2016

Roepke and Coode-Adams have known each other for more than thirty years. They met at Edinburgh College of Art in nineteen eighty something long ago.  At that time the education at ECA was stuck at post-Impressionism, already old old fashioned by London, New York and Berlin standards. For Roepke and Coode-Adams this was not enough. They needed to square this archaic education with contemporary practice, and with political events. They needed to make sense of their own lives. They needed to still their own turbulent hearts. For both artists there is a sense in which their artworks are votive offerings, an invocation to the day, an apotropaic message, to avert peril on behalf of all of us.

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Reliefs, serially numbered  Jakob Roepke heavy cardboard, pigment, chalk, wax. Size of each element c. 22 x 15 x 6 cm since 1996

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The Perfectly Good Wife  Ben Coode-Adams W119 x H102.5 cms watercolour on paper 2015

Gallerie dreiZehn is a new venture founded by Monika Krause & Mark Williams, the proprietors of GLASKAR Berlin. Next to their main shop is a smaller shop unit that was being used as a store room. This space has been tidied up and repurposed as a gallery. Krause and Williams have no great pretensions for the gallery. It’s a working space to be used by artists for interesting projects. ‘Same Difference’ is a prototype for how Krause and Williams might use and operate the gallery. The details will be worked out. It’s action research. Sometimes you can’t wait for everything to be perfect, you just have to get on with it and see what happens with what’s available. In the meantime do please keep in touch for general information, opening times and special events. It’s going to be fun.

The exhibition will be open by appointment. Contact Mark on glasklarberlin@icloud.com to visit. Ben Coode-Adams will be around until 24th November and working in the gallery. He’ll announce the times on instagram: @bcoodeadams facebook: Ben Coode-Adams and twitter: @BenCoodeAdams.