HIGH FIVE RENÉE

10.07.2015 - 18.10.2015

The Swiss artist Renée Levi (b. 1960 in Istanbul) is known first and foremost for her architecture-related painting. Thus the Stadtgalerie Saarbrücken will also become the site of interventions of paintings and installations that Levi will install in collaboration with the artists‘ group HIGH FIVE (Jeannice Keller, Patricia Murawski, Angelika Schori, and Claire Zumstein) At the same time, the poetic image-text series Baie des Anges (Bay of angels) by Renée Levi and Markus Stegmann will be shown as a light-box installation in the inner courtyard.

Renée Levi’s painting is produced with spray cans or in broad gestures directly on the wall or canvas. It is produced in rapid process and is always related to the site. This connection to architecture is related to Levi’s first training as an architect, which she completed at Herzog & de Meuron in the 1980s. Her real motivation as an artist, however, derives from an attitude that is critical of the image; it can be seen in the context of the conceptual critique of painting of the 1990s, which called for new solutions. Levi set out from experiments on the interaction of color, form, and space to develop an oeuvre that comprises many media and in which the artist, the audience, and the art objects have an active relationship.

The Stadtgalerie Saarbrücken will become the site for Levi’s painterly interventions that radically alter the space, dissolving it so that the expansive experience of color will open up our eyes to a painting that is in the position to create its own new spaces and to expose their structures. With four oversized, freestanding paintings on the first level of the exhibition and a painting nearly twenty-four-meters-long on a longitudinal wall, Levi’s works are presented as objects that can be experienced physically that assert themselves self-confidently within the Baroque architecture of the building.

The transverse spaces on both floors will feature the works of the artists’ group HIGH FIVE—Jeannice Keller, Patricia Murawski, Angelika Schori, and Claire Zumstein—who have studied with Levi. Their paintings, sculptures, and installations play with the possibilities of space and architecture in order to put our perception to the test in ever new ways.

This exhibition will be supplemented by an installation in the Stadtgalerie’s courtyard with twenty-two light boxes showing the poetic image-text series Baie des Anges. It was developed especially for the arcades in the courtyard and was based on photographs taken with mobile phones that Levi sent to the writer and art critic Markus Stegmann. Stegmann responded to these visual postings with brief lyrical texts, often in dialogue form, occasionally citing other authors. Eleven of these dialogues will be shown as part of a long-term installation in the courtyard.