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‘Über Freude und Enttäuschungen - Joy and Disappointment’, with Angela Stauber, Kunstverein Ottobrunn, Munich
‘Über Freude und Enttäuschungen - Joy and Disappointment’, with Angela Stauber, Kunstverein Ottobrunn, Munich
Canadian born Micha Eden Erdész (b 1975) and Munich inhabitant Angela Stauber (b 1977) are an artistic doubling sharing simultaneous aloof and civically-minded attitudes. Both internationally exhibiting artists are transformers of a kind. Re-inventing neo-liberal landscapes with sometimes serene and sometimes severe gestures, both artists offer incorporeal spiritual counterpoints made visible. The show’s namesake: ‘Joy and Disappointment’, is a cyclic manifesto for painting as a vestige of interwoven Eternalism - the view that all existence in time is equally real - and in endless return. An Ouroboros of mirage, mise-en-scène and virtual diorama, each artist brings their own slant to the nature of stepping inside or remaining outside the 2-dimensional plane.
Reticently utopian in the case of Stauber, the works engage the viewer in abstract metaphysical terms, using colour both as a cloaked interruption and portal for imagined transformations of contexts at hand or otherwise. For ‘Joy and Disappointment’, Stauber reveals transitory arcades in oil and watercolours, an including ‘Lightroom’ (2021) and ‘View to the World’ (2021) and centrepiece of oil on a tarpaulin, most likely seen tying down merchandise on road hauliers. These purposeful rites of passage are the elephant in the room under wraps, the fact this collaboration is jarred by two conflicting movements: iconoclasm (Brexit) vs contagion (Covid-19).
Or ambivalently liminal as in the work of Erdész, whose clandestine Intermedial strategy yields Magical Realism in the site-associative offering: ‘The Happy Games’ (2021). For Erdész, the tragic association of Canadian water polo players with the infiltration of non-athletes to the Olympic village during the 1972 Munich games, reconstitutes naivety as an assuaging piece of quasi-restitutive memorabilia. Erdész identifies the majestic egalitarianism of a stadium built in altruism, with the perceived neutrality of Canadian athletes on the world political stage, some who left the games feeling complicit in the turn of horror that ensued.
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‘Inland flood’, High Chelmer Shopping Centre, UK, 2021 tbc
Micha Eden Erdész (°1975, Toronto) is a contemporary Intermedia artist, curator and artistic researcher.
Guided by a desire to ambiguously traverse between interior and exterior worlds through the interaction of diverse media, Erdész engages with Intermedia as a kind of sensory technology to suggest a subaltern layer of knowledge human, animal or neither. Erdész’s formative influences are those of suburban Toronto of the 1980’s, particularly the carpeted basement of a Downsview split-level house with a blue door, a redundant home bar partially stocked by random liquors and beverages adorned the edge of this nether-land, fairground attractions; the Darkride, gravity rides, vertical rides, dodgems, hauntings and fun houses imagined within the shopping mall. A singular drum symbol remained in the same spot on the floor and behind the bottom of the stairs, the massive weight of an underfloor safe’s door remained always open and always empty. Among works in oil on rosin and mirror-glass, textiles, chrome and video, some pieces involve the dextrous working of oil paint and fine drawings onto synthetic transparencies. Eschewing the structural clarity of the artist’s architectural and philosophical training in favour of more ephemeral, ghost-like evocations, fictions are emphasised over physical viability. Tending towards human potrayals of the supernatural in folklore, fairgrounds and horror films, descriptions of consciousness, mutability and disappearance infect his work. Erdész revived the fictive anchorite persona of his former residency at the Florence Trust in London returning in 2015 with a solo show. ‘Hearth and Heat’ was a re-reading of Hampstead Heath in North London as a trove of psychic experience. Micha has curated major exhibitions including ‘The Liminal Phase’ in 2006, in 13, 000 sq feet of commercial space in Holloway, London as part of the then urban regeneration programme, culminating in his own work ‘So near far [New_Lon]’ (2011), a public intervention collectively mapping residents’ impression of the stadium living on it’s edge condition. In 2019, he brought ‘New Magical Realism’ to the The Minories, Colchester, which included Dutch, Belgian, German and Scottish painters, sculptors and installation artists and inlcuded artists supported by the Landeshauptstadt München.
