Group Exhibition
Adalberstr. 9 + – Muscle Temple Painting Society

02. - 25.11.2012

Adalbertstr. 9 + – Muscle Temple Painting Society is a very physical exhibition, focusing on our experience of being there, and being with the paintings. It consists of a group of paintings that both make and shape the space they are in. They create and generate confrontations and connections. These are not paintings as objects, but as processes of becoming – of becoming a place. These are works that shout at us. They challenge us, but they also caress us. They look back at us, and throw us off balance.

The motto of the exhibition is borrowed from the American filmmaker John Waters, known for his more than usually experimental style. Out of all the possible candidates, he is the one who defines the task of art as being: to confuse us in a beautiful way.

To repeat: to confuse us in a beautiful way.

The second starting point for the exhibition is Berlin, especially its backyards, the old industrial “Hinterhöfe”, the courtyards where most of the artist’s studios are. The exhibition’s first title – Adalbertstr. 9 + – refers to one specific site at the heart of the old 36 Kreuzberg district. It has a typical Hinterhof with a wide variety of small businesses and semi-weird enterprises.

The second title – Muscle Temple Painting Society – comes from one of the strange businesses that occupied the site for many years. The company’s logo is also on the exhibition invitation. This image is well-known to all the locals. It used to entice them into the esoteric practices at the heart of bodybuilding, and was vividly visible from the street.

The Muscle Temple Painting exhibition is not about showing or flexing muscles. What it stands for is an articulation of the multiple ways in which we occupy the spatial dimensions of our everyday lives. It is the muscles (as in our bodies, which experience the world) that are challenged and shaken, and also flirted with and tempted. And it is a temple, as in intended to induce a certain pleasure – the pleasure of being with these particular works, in this particular space, at this particular time.

All of these particular aspects will hopefully make themselves felt in an exhibition that makes you want to be with the works and get closer to them in their physical and spatial presence.