Gunter Reski at Galerie Nagel Draxler

Artist: Gunter Reski

Exhibition title: Organwanderung jetzt

Venue: Galerie Nagel Draxler, Cologne, Germany

Date: September 8 – October 20, 2018

Photography: Simon Vogel / all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Galerie Nagel Draxler, Cologne

A fragment is a piece of a puzzle that does not need its puzzle anymore. The loss of its original context is still felt and forms the basis of his moments of tension.
The exhibition Organ Migration Now also deals with expanded literary possibilities. Texts and images appear in an iridescent way in the visualizing, illustrative and imaginative sense. The wall newspaper as an early form of display commits its potential readers as well as observers to a concrete place. Otherwise, media come in different ways directly into the house, or are increasingly characterized by unconditional mobile availability. The wall installation Organ Migration Now mixes originals, printouts and documents into a multi-parted context of meaning, which also operates with contradictory moments of renegade speech and images. The starting point is a single person who decides to accompany his foreseeable life events daily with a self-published newspaper. The readership consists of a single person who is identical to the author. This results in various connections and implications such as documented, condensed wasteland or even exacerbations of absurdly independent everyday routines of a somebody who is either “Herr Ebenso“ or “Herr Soeben”. Excluded that he will ever hear these names. This kind of individual destiny is not unprecedented. It could be the artist of this exhibition or the tenth passerby, who will cross your way the day after tomorrow.

So far Gunter Reski has become known as a painter with figuratively symbolic exaggerations and meaning tensions between De- and Reskilling, who also writes about art as an artist and co-edited publications such as the painting reader “The Happy Fainting of Painting”. In his pictures text appears comparatively often as an essential pictorial component. The previous dual image and text mixture has recently become part of a newspaper-like exhibition conglomerate. The overarching media format of a supposed newspaper structure allows a multifaceted play between seeming and actual and claims within a respective thematic meaning situation. The center is a male isolation. But not even gender seems to matter. The mood is supported by a stoic, no-alternative, life-coping that can no longer imagine or desire an outside. Like any other willfully thematic constriction, this produces its own special overpressure situation, too, which, in turn, has to ventilate out of the shifted starting position and meaning.