Phone Sleeper assembles works by Vittorio Brodmann, Yvo Cho, Stephan Dillemuth, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Helena Huneke, Isabelle Francis McGuire, and Julia Scher. In it, we encounter figures, spaces, scenes, and scenarios that testify to a freedom of expression and speak about pleasure and nervousness, and ultimately about the ways in which we move through the world, considering it while we compose ourselves in the face of it.
Vittorio Brodmann’s (b. 1987, Ettingen, Switzerland, lives and works in Berlin) paintings are characterized by figures that inhabit them morphed into an intermediate, fantastic world, where they reveal at times human, at times animal, and often quixotic traits. Touching upon a number of painting traditions as well as modern cartoons, Brodmann’s compositions and themes disclose references, in equal measure, from the surreal automatism of André Masson and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s intense color palette to traditional Japanese Yokai prints – renderings of phantom-like entities, often with no distinctive shape. Sitcom set-ups and one-liners can be seen to inform Brodmann in tandem with the aesthetics of early Nickelodeon or Cartoon Network animations. As animated figures and doodles collapse and mutate into each other across the canvas, Brodmann marries deliberate approach with coincidence – the scenarios hold defined narratives, but ultimately remain open. He continuously entertains this balance, most notably in situating the works in between the slapstick and earnest.
Yvo Cho’s (b. 1994, Heidelberg, Germany, lives and works in Cologne) film Room 304 (2022) was shot in the artist’s former classroom and studio at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. This room has historically belonged to the photography department, beginning with the tenure of Bernd and Hilla Becher and continuing with figures such as Thomas Ruff and, briefly, Jeff Wall. During Cho’s studies, the class was led by Christopher Williams. The film’s title references the physical space itself and its layered pedagogical and artistic histories.
The film traces a slow pan across the large panoramic window that defines the room – once during the day, once at night – observing the cityscape of Düsseldorf and the Rhine. In parts of the frame, CRTV monitors – remnants of class projects – appear on desks, further situating the work within the infrastructural reality of the class. The soundscape combines ambient recordings of the city with a voiceover excerpted from Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Gai Savoir (1969): two characters (Émile Rousseau and Patricia Lumumba) meet secretly at night in an abandoned TV studio. They seek to relearn language entirely, removing its ideological bias in order to develop a new, radical framework for thinking and communication. In the excerpt, they conduct a word association exercise – a gesture that evokes the supposed innocence of spontaneous associations as a means of radically relearning language. Room 304 reflects on the conditions of education and the pedagogical models that shape artistic thinking. It considers how knowledge is transmitted not solely through formal instruction, but also through environment, observation, and associative thought – and how language and perception themselves can become sites of critical inquiry within institutional frameworks.
Stephan Dillemuth’s (b. 1954, Büdingen, Germany, lives and works in Bad Wiessee) artistic practice manifests itself in a testing of techniques and spaces of self-determination, which he understands as bohemian research laboratories. In this, an aesthetic is articulated that does not seek to emulate the manufacturing industry in another trade, but rather operates in an open-ended, amateurish, provisional, and occasionally collective manner. Despite an astonishingly broad frame of references, ranging from the life reform movement to blockchain technology and the beauty gallery at Nymphenburg Palace, Dillemuth has created an astonishingly concise oeuvre over the years that takes the content it deals with too seriously to sacrifice it to common definitions of career. Fundamental to this is a conception of artistry as a way of life that is deviant due to radical curiosity and a reflected striving for autonomy, but unlike the alleged genius, never renounces a sense of community.
His latest exhibition at the Neuer Essener Kunstverein, Essen, Germany, manifests “a specific interest in the simultaneous whirring of alternative reality machines, as Dillemuth experienced as a student during the news broadcast in the packed Ratinger Hof, a well-known counterculture pub at the time. Or the switching off of central parameters of what we call everyday life or reality, as collectively experienced in times of confinement during the COVID-19 pandemic. But if reality is not a given, but a fabrication, how can I intervene in production myself? And what is reality anyway??” (Aus dem Ausstellungstext von Wenn die Wirklichkeit Kommt, Moritz Scheper, Neuer Essener Kunstverein, 2024).
Part of this exhibition was the video work Lack of Coherence (2011), which takes its title from the place of its making and first appearance, an exhibition space in Porto named A Certain Lack of Coherence, and which is dedicated to all peeping toms.
Lynn Hershman Leeson (b. 1941, Cleveland, lives and works in San Francisco and New York City) has shaped artistic discourses on performance, interactivity, cyborgs, surveillance, artificial intelligence, and biogenetics since the 1960s, paving a path that many generations would follow. She has worked with some of the most significant scientists of our time, bringing art into a complex dialogue with science. As a professor and critic, Hershman Leeson has written extensively on art, media, and politics. As early as 1985, she considered how personal computers decentralize information and “subvert all forms of traditional authority— political, social, and religious.” Decades later, these revelations define our conversations around social media, democratic participation, and misinformation.
Phone Sleeper (2023), which is on view as part of the eponymous exhibition, addresses our shifting environment and increasing addiction to social media and constant communication. This work confronts the permeation of media into our collective and individual psyches. While we consider technology subjugated to our control, the truth is often the reverse, especially with cell phones, which track our every move and which are often the last thing we see before sleeping and the first thing we see upon waking.
Helena Huneke (b. 1967, Münster, d. 2012, Berlin) has left us a comparably small body of work that is characterized by a great mastery of materials and a simultaneous fragility and intimacy. The desire for intellectual penetration of her work was just as intense as the desire for practical experience, the handling of the material, the state of becoming, the shaping itself. A high ethos and the desire to see the success of the moment fixed in the finished work of art both delighted and tormented her. Instead of defining, determining, and concluding, she wanted to open up and, in exchange with other artists — Huneke was founding member and central figure of the artist group Akademie Isotrop (1996–2000) with fellow artists such as André Butzer, Nina Könnemann, Birgit Megerle, and Jonathan Meese, a.o., and operated a restaurant in her apartment in Hamburg for a longer period in the 1990s — sought to sound out conditions in the artistic field that would not lead to a rigid setting and competitive behavior, but to a utopian elevation.
Featured in this exhibition are two paintings on paper — the dominant medium within Huneke’s oeuvre — and a mid-scale assemblaged painting (Title unknown, 2002), featuring the artist’s own pyjama pants sewn onto an orange/black striped cloth — a present of her mother. With only a few, seemingly incidental brushstrokes in blue, green, and red, a small, sewn-on square piece of used terry cloth, and a barely visible and obviously fragmented spray-painted lettering on the letters “K” and “R,” complement the central motif to form a picture that is characterized by an openness and lack of closure typical of Huneke. It is the first time in over ten years that this work is shown publicly after the group exhibition Painting Forever! at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, 2013.
We are very much looking forward to the first solo exhibition of the work of Helena Huneke at the gallery in fall 2025.
Across a growing body of work, Isabelle Frances McGuire (b. 1994, Austin, lives and works in Chicago) turns to figures that loom large in the cultural imagination or those that keep reappearing, sometimes against all odds — whether a president and moral exemplar such as Abraham Lincoln, classic monsters like Frankenstein, or the fame-destined ingénue of A Star is Born. McGuire embraces these apparent archetypes and the stories they keep generating, often giving them a new uncanny life or a kind of feral energy.
On a material level, McGuire’s work takes shape as technology meets and mediates history’s lingering specters, especially in their pop culture guises. With the learn-it-and-do-it spirit of an engineer, the Chicago-based artist creates sculptures, installations, and props for videos using technologies such as 3D printing and computer-controlled milling based on digital models. At times, McGuire also uses DIY methods like “modding” and “kitbashing,” in which existing models are altered or combined to make new forms — borrowing techniques from gaming culture as readily as from the history of art.
Julia Scher (b. 1954, Los Angeles, lives and works in Cologne) is widely known for her pioneering work in the field of “Surveillance Art.” In her early, seldom-exhibited paintings, Scher begins to develop the singular exploration of surveillance, voyeurism, and authority that has occupied her multimedia installations of the last 35 years. The early paintings tether the beginnings of the artist’s interest in surveillance to her landscape painting practice of the 1980s. Upon receiving her first video camera, Scher began to conceptualize landscape through painting and video. All Plugged Up (1985) marks a formative transition towards the concerns that have preoccupied much of her ensuing practice.
“With the overlapping needs of the body and of technology, what might a painting about this look like? A painting is cultural property. So art in this sense has its limitations, it’s not using media technology as in my other work. How is it to fill a canvas in this case, at this time for me. So a single profile, black and red. A painted plug. Painted monitors against a brilliant blue sky. Blood yet reaches the boundaries of the edges. There are no guidelines here, no… boundaries cited except for the virtual confinement of the body represented and its ‘contents’. The electrical plug below takes its place in the landscape. So the double that makes a whole. The body is stopped ‘plugged up’ and at the same time ‘plugged in.’” (Julia Scher on her painting All Plugged Up).
Additionally on view is Outtakes (1995), a series of Polaroids taken in the course of a photo shoot in New York, commissioned by Artforum in 1995.
