Resistant Materials goes to Sluice Exchange Berlin

Do please come to our presentation at Sluice Exchange Berlin. 

Sluice_Exchange Berlin 2018

Das Kühlhaus Berlin

Luckenwalder Str. 3, 10963 Berlin, Germany

16-18 November 2018
Fri 1800-2300
Sat + Sun 1100-1900

E.M.C. Collard

Ben Coode-Adams

Fiona Curran

Justin Knopp

Freddie Robins

We’ve been having a good deal of private time – working things out – over the last year. It’s been work but productive so we were delighted to show at M100 in Odense, Denmark in September. We organised an exhibition called ‘Resistant Materials’. Thank you M100 (http://m100.dk) for hosting us and precipitating a crystallisation of our anger, and sadness,  joy and hope. Thank you Theis Vallø Madsen for a very interesting take on our work (see below) and thank you to Kristine Mengel for taking great photographs. In the end we’re just speaking for ourselves.

Ben Coode-Adams & Justin Knopp  Proof  2018 letterpress wood type on paper, dimensions variable Photo: Kristine Mengel

The exhibition concerned how it is possible to fight back specifically, when discussion is generally shut down. We showed work by Ben Coode-Adams, Fiona Curran, Justin Knopp, and Freddie Robins.

For the Berlin show we are delighted to add E.M.C. Collard to the line-up. Her paintings fit right in to our discussion about biting countryside with their visceral natural imagery.

‘Resisting Coziness

A Danocentric Perspective on the works of Coode-Adams, Robins, Knopp and Curran

Theis Vallø Madsen

Danes are famous for their ”hygge” brought about by knitted jumpers, rain, dimmed lighting, cookies, and half-timbered houses in the countryside. In recent years coziness and other forms of “moods”, “Stimmung” or atmospheres have become objects of studies in academia. Philosophers regard these kinds of “atmospheres” as aesthetic phenomena in-between objective and subjective states of being. According to German philosopher Gernot Böhme, atmospheres are typical intermediate phenomena bordering subjecthood and objecthood. A pleasant or unpleasant atmosphere are far from vague or weak but on the contrary “[…] bathe everything in a certain light.” They are totalizing. Yet it is possible to resist and even change a specific atmosphere in a room by an extra-ordinary event. Something has to break, or somebody has to say something completely out of line in order to change the mood of the room. Artworks have also been known to disturb pleasant moods by picturing or including things that are usually left out in order not to spoil a common sense of well-being and harmony.

Freddie Robins Someone Else’s Dream  Series of reworked knitted jumpers, mixed fibres 2014 – 2016 L-R. -burnt, -hanged, -crashed

The works of the four British artists currently exhibiting at M100 all seem to – to a Dane at least – resist coziness and other kinds of pleasantness. Freddie Robins’ hand knitted jumpers invoke a sense of coziness brought forth by their materiality but the reworked pictures work against the intuitive feel and cultural signification of their material. Materiality and imagery are at odds with one another.

The paintings by Ben Coode-Adams are also uneasy. Things and shapes are flickering, worming around or rearranging themselves out and into one another. These paintings are on the move.

Ben Coode-Adams Self-Portrait with Bluebird on a red ground 2018 Watercolour on paper H58xW76cms Photo: Douglas Atfield

Fiona Curran’s paintings picture clouds and rainbows in synthetic or strange forms. They have been short-circuited or recharged from an unusual energy source. Justin Knopp’s type based posters promote resistance by words and materials. The four artists are all navigating in-between different states or materials whether that would be coziness and discomfort, materiality and image, or harmony and disharmony. The artworks appear to be uneasy with their surroundings and their current situation. This uneasiness is much more interesting than consensus and established truths.’

Paintings and embroideries by Fiona Curran and Ben Coode-Adams Photo: Kristine Mengel

We decided to take this show to Berlin with Sluice Exchange. This show builds on our article in Sluice Magazine Autumn 2018 concerning local v’s international. Ben’s photograph of Dedham Vale is on the cover.

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.