Artists: Magnus Frederik Clausen, Débora Delmar, Laurent Dupont
Venue: Super Super Markt, Berlin, Germany
Date: February 16 – March 31, 2024
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Super Super Markt, Berlin
Note: List of works is available here
We’re pleased to present Magnus Frederik Clausen, Débora Delmar, Laurent Dupont, the inaugural exhibition at Brunnenstr. 22, Super Super Markt’s first gallery space in Berlin. Bringing together three artists who sample and reproduce everyday materials and objects, the works in the exhibition create a response to the contextual value of goods and image-making today. The process of production, of translation, of instructing someone, something or yourself, is as present as what you see in front of you.
Magnus Frederik Clausen paints paintings without painting them. Made up of strokes, lines, dials, and numbers, the works in the exhibition are commissioned clock paintings, showing different times of day – both clear and abstracted. After initially teaching his son to read the clock, by drawing time in either analogue or digital form and then asking him to translate each given clock to its adverse, Clausen realised he could orchestrate the making of a picture within a simple system of translation.
He instructs family members, assistants or in cases gets others to direct him, under strict conditions: An execution time frame, what colours and materials to use and what format to paint on. Much like a conductor, these instructions set the tone for what is to unfold – a pure human response in the form of a painting. Through these acts of painting, we can see an exploration into the heart of what matters here. It’s less about the time, but unbridled painting itself.
Within her practice, Débora Delmar continuously examines the contextual value of goods, by investigating their production, distribution, consumption and disposal. Growing up in Mexico City and living in London, her Liberty Roses works – titled after the famed department store from 1875 and now a staple in the city – construct a symbolic bridge between the two. After first encountering Liberty’s Carline Rose print on the cladding covering the store’s facade during recent renovations, Delmar hired traditional Mexican sign painter Martín Hernández to replicate images that she provided, initially taken from Liberty’s e-commerce website.
While these acrylic on metal works connect two cities, Delmar’s place of birth and current residence, they question the generative production of everyday images and objects, by means of translation and appropriation.
Laurent Dupont’s works originate from a series of cardboard objects, boxes that the artist paints to reach an idea of their original state with acrylic paint. Found in and around his studio and hometown of Brussels, they become reproductions of and on themselves. By meticulously reiterating the existing forms and colours found on the surface of these objects, Dupont’s process follows an almost technical repetition while allowing for a more intimate focus on the act of painting.
However futile the process, mimicking a digital rendering in an analogous response, it becomes an act of care and rehabilitation.
