Massimo Bartolini / Wiebke Siem

Massimo Bartolini’s work embraces various materials and techniques, from sculpture and performance to photography. His often sensual artworks induce in the viewer a meditative state that is still highly experiential, making us reflect on the relativity of what is stable and unchangeable.

Bartolini’s intriguing installation is in part inspired by Herman Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener,(1853) the story of a Wall Street clerk who, numbed by the apparent futility of life, retreats into himself, refusing to do anything whatsoever. On entering the upper gallery the visitor is confronted by a doorway which glows enigmatically with a soft green light. Pushing through the door one finds that the office has been transported into the exhibition space. In the room beyond, the desk has been replaced by a small bed and beside this is a pool of dark blue water whose surface is broken by a perpetual wave.

Working with the domestic scale of the space Bartolini has created an installation which functions as a working environment but it also alludes to the idea of refuge, somewhere slightly detached from the rest of the world.

Wiebke Siem’s installation in the lower gallery makes reference to a wall painting by the artist Blinky Palermo which was created in the Kabinette für aktuelle Kunst in Bremerhaven in the early 1970s. Palermo’s original painting has long since vanished, but Siem has reconstructed the work as if it has existed in a state of neglect for the past 30 years. The painting acts as both a critique and a homage to high modernism, the walls are grimy and cracked and the space ironically resembles a rather dingy basement.

In another space she exhibits furniture pieces replicated by hand from examples of 18th Century German folk furniture. These works, with their naïve designs and bizarre paint effects represent the very antithesis of rational and functional modernism. Just as the wall painting reproduces the Palermo work in decay, with the reproduced furniture the process of ageing is reversed and it appears to be completely new.