With it’s last show for 2016 RAUMX is presenting two artists who are working with multi media.

German artist Annebarbe Kau constructs with wire, textile and string her drawings. For RAUMX she will also prepare a new sound installation. Kau has shown extensively in Germany and abroad.

British artist Vincent Hawkins is showing recent paintings and card board constructions. He lives in London and makes prints, paintings on canvas paper and card. He has shown extensively in Britain and abroad including solo shows in Chicago and Paris in recent years.

 

Vincent Hawkins 

Rarely is there a clear idea worked out in advance. I decide on materials and take it from there.  I work in a way that is improvisational through making, which I don’t see as an impoverishment of any kind. Beginning with a  mark or a form and proceed by responding to what is there before me. It is building in order to excavate. I think a lot of abstract artists work in this way because painting is composed of many different trajectories in collision and to try and identify origins and sources quickly leads to a sense of being tied up in knots. I like art that doesn’t try to necessarily look like anything. It doesn’t try to define meaning .

 “Meaning is something only for an individual, it has a home only in one person. The verb “to mean” implies something exists to be taken or learned from something else; and since subjects mean different things to every individual, meaning is purely subjective. Thus it is ‘subjective’ or should be understood to have an ‘anti-system’ or ‘anti-answer’ sensibility” Kierkegaard .

  Vincent Hawkins 2016

Annebarbe Kau

Along the line of

The General

In everyday life, lines supposedly give us “safety” and “orientation”, indicate or show us a direction, create connections and provide a basis– at least, we assume this to be so… And yes, as a matter of fact, in notebooks or on graph paper, the lines are already there, and our (western) culture then prescribes the direction (from top left to lower right). Even where there are no linear guidelines, the white, seemingly

bare, paper has been invisibly pre-formatted. This also applies to lines that flow together to form letters. – Perhaps it takes art, or more precisely, drawing to show us what possibilities of space are left at all.

The Haptic

The fall of the lines, their whirling, and their floating in a space they visually evoke themselves, their condensing, the dissolution of the surface, the highlighting the structure of the paper by the way the line has been laid out, the detachment from the paper, the flatness of what is actually a three-dimensional thread, cable or string, the lines seizing the space – all of this (and much more) are possible visual functions of the line in the work of Annebarbe Kau. For all of this, we still have not addressed the medium that provides such experience. However, the

descriptions already indicate we are scarcely referring to classically framed drawings here, (their mats placing them at a distance). Rather, it is about a completely haptic appearance of the line, articulated with the pages and in the materiality.

Stefan Gronert

Alles verkehrt

A artist portrait by Sabine Elsa Mueller in German only