Relegation ~ via

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Hannelore (Catherine Lorent, Tom Früchtl) 2020, Foto: Noa Lohrmann

Catherine Lorent, visual artist, musician and art historian (PhD), creates complex Gesamtkunstwerks of voice, painting, drawing, sculpture, performance and popular and classical music in theatrical settings – hybrid installations that play with baroque references and dissolve boundaries of art genres.

Different format drawings of strange chimaeras and peculiar coats of arms are mounted on the wall or hung from the ceiling above a grand piano, together with electronic guitars. Electromagnetic interfaces affixed to the guitars’ strings interact with movements of the visitors and transform them into sounds. The combination of objects, sound composition, and ornamental figures fuses into a complexly layered real-time polyphony or a sensual Gesamtkunstwerk. With an anarchic attitude, aesthetic vigour, with conceptual clarity and stringent multitonality, Lorent challenges the either–or of dichotomous thinking. Her unorthodox approach references the concept of the sublime, among other things, which has been banished from art as something too lofty, and with this approach she claims a realm of freedom, beyond any rules. Relegation denotes not only banishment, exclusion, but also the path of a self-chosen liberation from authoritarian structures.

The gallery’s space provides a stage for Lorent’s daring experiments on amalgamating visual art and music, high and popular culture, symmetry and entropy. Colourful, loudly wheezing, quietly whispering, wild and sensitive, she defies aesthetic and social binary classifications and uses a quasi-baroque strategy, in which the critique of structures of power and domination hides beneath the superficially absurd opulence of appearance.

Curated by Veronika Witte

Press:
Michael Freerix: “Dekadenz und Übertreibung” in taz, 4.7.22

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Programme Series VOICE:over

Over the next two years, the Galerie Nord | Kunstverein Tiergarten’s VOICE:over programme series will delve into various phenomena related to the voice. With cross-disciplinary exhibition projects, performances and a multifaceted outreach programme, VOICE:over explores the changes in meaning and significance of physical and social forms of the voice – from screams to speech and song to artificial intelligences’ posthuman imitation of the human voice.

Supported by the federal programme “Neustart Kultur” of Stiftung Kunstfonds and by the multi-sector funding as well as the district funding of the Senate Department for Culture and Europe and the Klaviersalon Berlin.