Making sense of life

Horst Ademeit

“It is just a question of time before I catch them red-handed,” Ademeit claimed. Horst Ademeit (1937-2010) obsessively devoted close to 40 years of his life to collecting information – through photography and meticulous note-keeping – that would establish the existence of what he called “cold rays,” unseen forces that he believed severely impaired and impacted his life and surroundings.

First trained as a textile designer, Ademeit entered Joseph Beuys’s class at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in the late 1970. When his work was rejected as too conservative—too academic—he left not only Beuys’s class but the art world at large. He took up photography in order to contend with his mounting “cold rays” concern and as a result of this mental state he was positioned within Photography Brut.

With the help of Polaroid photography as well as analog and digital photography, he initially started with documenting his immediate environment – his apartment building, its basement and yard, and nearby houses – he then moved further afield, scouring his neighbourhood for traces of “radiation damage.” Construction sites, automobiles, bicycles, and garbage piles were all subject to his photographic studies, each precisely labeled with date, time, and location. When he found that a building’s window shades were suspiciously left closed, Ademeit returned to the location daily, over the course of months, and if they remained that way he would note it in the margins of the original Polaroid.

These observation photos document the efficacy of this threatening power in his immediate life environment, showing construction site work, abandoned bicycles, accumulations of garbage, and oil slicks. Each of the several thousands of daily images is numbered, dated, and inscribed with indications of the date, the smells, sounds, weather and the instruments’ readings, as well as Ademeit’s reflections concerning the news and daily life in his miniature handwriting that is hardly readable. Ademeit created structures of order for himself in an attempt to make sense of an otherwise all-consuming presentiment and presented this in exactly 6.006 polaroids.

Horst Ademeit (1937-2010, GER) was born in Cologne, Germany and lived and worked in Düsseldorf, Germany, where he ultimately passed away in 2010. He was discovered in 2008 by Delmes & Zander, where he had his first exhibition. In the year of his passing he had his breakthrough in New York at White Columns and a year later in 2011 he had his first solo museum exhibition at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin. He has since been in many group exhibitions in various galleries mainly in Germany, but also in London at Somerset House and at David Zwirner in New York. His work is home in collections such as Art Institute of Chicago, Collection Bruno Decharme and Delmes & Zander.

On Lies, Secrets, and Silence

Marjolijn de Wit

The works of Marjolijn de Wit appear like vivid puzzles asking to be solved. Often composed from a random mixture of various elements of flora and fauna such as leaves, birds, or flower petals, De Wit disturbs their hierarchy by adding human made objects, abstract painterly shapes, and playing with size, scale and composition that resembles the technique of collage. 

Throughout the rich canvasses, every object and element together resembles the act of a (future) archaeology, challenging the spectator to speculate on the relationship between all parts of the paintings. Unrelated objects appear as debris of a story that has yet to take place, even if it is only in the mind of the spectator entirely. They are the rubble of our society, in which nature is ever so often disrupted by the human urge to control it, and of which De Wit’s works provide a frame for the spectator to constantly find new narratives. 

Distinctive to the practice of De Wit is her use of contemporary signifiers; photographs, records, or pieces that resemble (torn) drawings continuously refer to forms of human creation and the existence of culture as oppositional to the wilderness of nature. Also in her techniques and use of painterly materials De Wit finds balance between aptly directed structures and the freedom of painting. Deliberately anti-aesthetic at times, she often works in a wet-on-wet technique that gives her work a true painterly atmosphere and that echoes the joy she finds in the act of making. What remains, in the end, for the spectator, is the continuously tantalising question of what the narrative of your history will read like, and the challenge to keep solving the puzzle of everything De Wit presents us in her vibrant paintings. 

Marjolijn de Wit (1979, NL) lives and works in Utrecht. She graduated from the Academy of Art and Design St. Joost in Breda and from 2008 – 2009  she was a resident at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. Her museum exhibitions include Torrance Art Museum, Torrance (CA), the De Pont Museum, Tilburg (NL), the Gemeentemuseum, The Hague (NL). She has had solo exhibitions at several galeries including Otto Zoo Gallery, Milan (IT) and Asya Geisberg Gallery, New York (US). In 2013 she earned the PULSE Prize, a jury-awarded grant.

(Text by: Menno Vuister)