Bait
Bait (Hebrew for House)
Rachel Kohn (Sculpture) – Oaf Kühnemann (Painting) – Andrea Morein (Mixed Media)
Duration: 4 – 26 March, 2022
Opening: Thursday, 3 March, 6 – 9 pm
Finissage and Artist Talk: Saturday, 26 March, 2022, 4 – 7 pm
Rachel Kohn
For me, the house is a symbolic object, because what is meant is not the rigid shell, but – as pars pro toto – life itself that takes place in the houses. Described in the symbol lexicon as a symbol of a "fenced area", the house can carry a great deal of ambivalence. It offers space for life, but it can also bury someone inside, not only in the real sense, but even more so in a figurative sense. It therefore depends strongly on the history or the fate of the respective residents, in which direction the horizon of meaning of the house opens. Sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously, one's own biography and personal experiences are staged here and translated into a universal formal language that can be read differently by everyone.
Rachel Kohn was born in Prague in 1962, studied at the Art Academy in Munich and graduated as a master student. Study exchanges brought her to Israel, Bolivia and Mexico. She was funded by the Berlin Artists' Fund and the Zurückgeben Foundation and has organized numerous exhibitions. Her material is the high-fired clay, her themes are houses and other structures that stand as symbols for relationships, life plans and philosophical thoughts. She has been on the board of the Frauenmuseum Berlin since 2007, where she is also a curator. Since 2020 she has been involved with the fair share initiative, which she co-founded! for more visibility of female artists.
Olaf Kühnemann
Simple? Simple House is a series of paintings I have been working on for the past 3 years.
This image of a House was realised as a kind of balancing act in relation to other more complex narrative works I have been making.
Painting this house is a restful pause, a way of letting go of questions of meaning in art.
They are all the same size, 40x30cm, painted with oil on brown and grey paper.
This image of a house is a meditation and repetition in painting, an attempt to be very direct and simple with the application of paint on the surface of the paper.
Playing with the illusions of flattens and 3 dimensionality. experimenting with colour and nuance. The repetition of this form and image are a kind of hopefulness within the act of painting to find a Simple House.
Olaf Kühnemann is a painter based in Berlin since 2009, working as an artist between Berlin and Tel Aviv. Studied with Artist Zvi Lachman in Israel and is a graduate of the New York Studio School and of Parsons School of design (1991-1994, MFA) NY USA. He is the recipient of the Tel-Aviv Museum Isracard prize 2008 and was included in the Jurors pick for the Book “100 Painters of Tomorrow” 2014. Kühnemann is also the Creative Director at LABA Berlin artist fellowship program, founded in January 2021.
Andrea Morein
For me Bait has a different sound, a different feeling than the German word Haus.
Bait is where there is a safe place - supposedly. Where I have a right to live - where I have neighbors with whom I live in peace - supposedly. Is my house also your house? Whose house was this before it became mine?
In Berlin I ask who were the previous residents (Nazis, Jews?).
In Israel I ask whose house was this and who lives there now?
Beit Israel. House of Israel: A promise built on sand. A longing that has nested in my DNA and leads me to believe what I want to believe: that peace is possible. Wanting to find the door through which I could enter into our house.
Andrea Morein, born 1950 in Vienna, back in Berlin after working in Tel Aviv, Java, Amsterdam & Cologne. Interdisciplinary artist & curator with a focus on embodied arts, collage, photography, gestural drawing. She examines how personal experience of one's history can be expanded & embedded in a broader context of community and historicity. Other aspects of her artistic practice is the visual transcription of literary texts and the exploration of the interconnectedness in spatial relationships.
Exhibition practice since 1997, including the Jewish Museum Vienna, Art Museum Bochum, Roman-Germanic Museum, Cologne, Kibbutz Gallery & Artists House Tel Aviv, Museolaboratorio, Citta S. Angelo, Frauenmuseum Bonn. Foundation of the showroom ODALISQUE, Berlin in 2020.
2021 curation and participation in the group exhibition 'M-bodi-ment-A' in the project space of the Deutscher Künstlerbund, Berlin.
