Humour Then
Eröffnungstag Mittwoch, 02. September 2020, 13:00 – 21:00 Uhr
Opening Day Wednesday, September 2, 2020, 1:00 – 9:00 pm
Ausstellungsansicht / Installation view, Lise Soskolne – Humour Then, Kunstverein Nürnberg, 2020. Courtesy die Künstlerin / the artist, und / and Kunstverein Nürnberg. Photo: Rory Witt
Ausstellungsansicht / Installation view, Lise Soskolne – Humour Then, Kunstverein Nürnberg, 2020. Courtesy die Künstlerin / the artist, und / and Kunstverein Nürnberg. Photo: Rory Witt
Ausstellungsansicht / Installation view, Lise Soskolne – Humour Then, Kunstverein Nürnberg, 2020. Courtesy die Künstlerin / the artist, und / and Kunstverein Nürnberg. Photo: Rory Witt
Ausstellungsansicht / Installation view, Lise Soskolne – Humour Then, Kunstverein Nürnberg, 2020. Courtesy die Künstlerin / the artist, und / and Kunstverein Nürnberg. Photo: Rory Witt
Ausstellungsansicht / Installation view, Lise Soskolne – Humour Then, Kunstverein Nürnberg, 2020. Courtesy die Künstlerin / the artist, und / and Kunstverein Nürnberg. Photo: Rory Witt
Ausstellungsansicht / Installation view, Lise Soskolne – Humour Then, Kunstverein Nürnberg, 2020. Courtesy die Künstlerin / the artist, und / and Kunstverein Nürnberg. Photo: Rory Witt
Bikini Girls (2000), Öl auf Leinwand / Oil on Canvas (links / left), Lise Soskolne – Humour Then, Kunstverein Nürnberg, 2020. Courtesy die Künstlerin / the artist, und / and Kunstverein Nürnberg. Photo: Rory Witt
Ausstellungsansicht / Installation view, Lise Soskolne – Humour Then, Kunstverein Nürnberg, 2020. Courtesy die Künstlerin / the artist, und / and Kunstverein Nürnberg. Photo: Rory Witt
Three frames from Jeanne Dielman (1998 / 2020), Öl auf Leinwand / Oil on Canvas (links / left), A Feminist Issue Is (2005), Öl auf Leinwand / Oil on Canvas (rechts / right), Lise Soskolne – Humour Then, Kunstverein Nürnberg, 2020. Courtesy die Künstlerin / the artist, und / and Kunstverein Nürnberg. Photo: Rory Witt
Ausstellungsansicht / Installation view, Lise Soskolne – Humour Then, Kunstverein Nürnberg, 2020. Courtesy die Künstlerin / the artist, und / and Kunstverein Nürnberg. Photo: Rory Witt
Ausstellungsansicht / Installation view, Lise Soskolne – Humour Then, Kunstverein Nürnberg, 2020. Courtesy die Künstlerin / the artist, und / and Kunstverein Nürnberg. Photo: Rory Witt
Humour Now (2005), Öl auf Leinwand / Oil on Canvas, Lise Soskolne – Humour Then, Kunstverein Nürnberg, 2020. Courtesy die Künstlerin / the artist, und / and Kunstverein Nürnberg. Photo: Rory Witt
Two Heads (2002), Öl auf Leinwand / Oil on Canvas, Lise Soskolne – Humour Then, Kunstverein Nürnberg, 2020. Courtesy die Künstlerin / the artist, und / and Kunstverein Nürnberg. Photo: Rory Witt
Then (2006), Öl auf Leinwand / Oil on Canvas, Lise Soskolne – Humour Then, Kunstverein Nürnberg, 2020. Courtesy die Künstlerin / the artist, und / and Kunstverein Nürnberg. Photo: Rory Witt
Eyeballs / Eggs (2006), Öl auf Leinwand / Oil on Canvas, Lise Soskolne – Humour Then, Kunstverein Nürnberg, 2020. Courtesy die Künstlerin / the artist, und / and Kunstverein Nürnberg. Photo: Rory Witt
Humour Then (2006), Öl auf Leinwand / Oil on Canvas, Lise Soskolne – Humour Then, Kunstverein Nürnberg, 2020. Courtesy die Künstlerin / the artist, und / and Kunstverein Nürnberg. Photo: Rory Witt
Men & Memories (2005), Öl auf Leinwand / Oil on Canvas, Lise Soskolne – Humour Then, Kunstverein Nürnberg, 2020. Courtesy die Künstlerin / the artist, und / and Kunstverein Nürnberg. Photo: Rory Witt
The Work (2005), Öl auf Leinwand / Oil on Canvas, Lise Soskolne – Humour Then, Kunstverein Nürnberg, 2020. Courtesy die Künstlerin / the artist, und / and Kunstverein Nürnberg. Photo: Rory Witt
Today (2000), Öl auf Leinwand / Oil on Canvas, Lise Soskolne – Humour Then, Kunstverein Nürnberg, 2020. Courtesy die Künstlerin / the artist, und / and Kunstverein Nürnberg. Photo: Rory Witt
b(light), derived from a painting by Michael Patterson (2019), Öl auf Leinwand / Oil on Canvas, Kunstverein Nürnberg, 2020. Courtesy die Künstlerin / the artist, und / and Kunstverein Nürnberg. Photo: Rory Witt
Lise Soskolne’s first solo exhibition in Germany, Humour Then at the Kunstverein Nürnberg, brings together a group of paintings that suggest a complex interplay between visual culture and its mediation of time. Mostly painted between 1998 and 2006 using appropriated motifs from advertising, Google image searches, psychology textbooks, film, and cinematic paraphernalia, Soskolne’s work outlines the kaleidoscopic and asynchronous space of visual culture at the turn of the millennium, as the language of the online search begins to organize the logic of unauthored and decontextualized images. In a series of self-authored provenance records written in 2020, Soskolne establishes a social history for each painting, documenting the process of sourcing the material and bringing together image and text. They can be downloaded here.
Operating on both sides of the threshold between language and image, the work in Humour Then is defined by an unresolved relationship between time—explicitly referenced in text—and the motifs: a hand clenching a rose, a pierced sofa, a bar stool bathed in infernal crimson and yellow light, monoprints of models in bikinis fading from one canvas to another. Mutually estranged, language and image overlap in unsettling resonance—like the memory of a joke that isn’t funny anymore.
Born in Toronto, Canada, in 1971, Lise Soskolne has lived and worked in New York since the late 1990s. She is a co-founder of Working Artists and the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.) and has been its core organizer since 2012. Recent exhibitions include The Mandelbrot Set (2020) at Svetlana (NY), The Work (2019) at The Mishkin (NY), UGG! and other problems (2018) at The Middler (NY), and Bethenny (2015) at Diorama (Oslo). Her work is also part of Not Working—Artistic production and matters of class at the Kunstverein München from September 12 to November 22, 2020.
