Kunstverein Nürnberg – Albrecht Dürer Gesellschaft

“Have you ever noticed that you can often learn more about other people–more about how they feel, how it feels to be them–by hearing them cough or make one of these innumerable inner noises, than by watching them for hours?” Elizabeth Bishop

“Feeling into the shape of another“ combines a series of newly produced editions and existing works from the Kunstverein Nürnberg’s archive. Moments of empathetic identification, in the form of an all-pervading anticipation of a counterpart, run through the works on display. While Maximiliane Baumgartner continues her artistic research on the Nuremberg artist Dore Meyer-Vax (1908–1980) in drawings as a form of “talking about pictures through pictures,” Lilli Lake and Antonia Beeskow immerse themselves in various lamenting female figures from history and sighs from different species with their editions. Tomoe Hikita’s paintings are characterized by a holistic absorption in their surroundings and the physical union with different beings and environments. In the drawing “Untitled (Der Fränkische Vampir)” by Veit Laurent Kurz, architectural and cultivated landscapes are combined with human elements, as gaping mouths peer out of house facades that transform the surrounding space into animated entities. The perception of body and space merge subtly in Hélène Fauquet’s glass bell jar. Hanging nearby, Patricia L. Boyd’s series of photogravures on hand-felted sheep’s wool in turn draws on the perpetual frenzy of genesis and decay, in which birth and death, production and decomposition are only separated by the blink of an eye. For Jason Hirata, empathizing with his counterpart—often an employer—is a natural part of his economic and consequently artistic reality. The conditions of artistic production and its communication thus become the self-reflexive subject of his artistic objects. Ladji Diaby examines which existing objects and images are “tolerated” in the artistic context and to what extent they fit into the narrow corset of a Eurocentric art canon, while incidentally invoking the beats of Rohff, one of the most successful rappers of the 2000s. Feeling into the shape of another—a complex conglomerate of overlapping self-perceptions and external perceptions, affections, emotions, and bonds—is ultimately also evident in Fatma Güdü’s painting, which is both a portrait and a self-portrait.

We would like to sincerely thank all the participating artists for their edition contributions and their support.

Artists: Maximiliane Baumgartner, Antonia Beeskow, Patricia L. Boyd, Ladji Diaby, Hélène Fauquet, Fatma Güdü, Tomoe Hikita, Jason Hirata, Veit Laurent Kurz, and Lilli Lake