Artists: Wera Bet and Paul DD Smith
Exhibition title: Running Hot and Cold
Venue: Kunstverein am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, Berlin, Germany
Date: June 6 – July 13, 2024
Photography: Courtesy the artist and Kunstverein am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz
The human presence in and around water is closely linked to existential questions and has always played a central role in literature and art. Here, it often represents the erotically connoted space of mythical beings and – in its civilized form as a bath – is allegorically highly charged. In art history, this theme is consistently treated with ambiguity: on the one hand, since Christian times at least, voyeurism has been dramatized as obscene; on the other hand, the naked, predominantly female body is presented to the gaze of the patron or viewer.
For their first joint institutional exhibition, Wera Bet and Paul DD Smith have selected works that specifically engage with the gaze in the context of intimate situations. By placing the theme of cleansing at the center of their artistic inquiry, they explore a genre that invites the viewer into intimate spaces where bodies are exposed in their vulnerability. It is a gaze that differs from a simple glance primarily in its active rather than passive nature. In the inevitable dualism of subject and Other – ultimately a power imbalance – performance and pose may serve as a means of defense or gestures of empowerment perceived by the observer.
Both artists draw on art-historical references, such as the story of Susanna and the Elders. Additionally, there are very private, voyeuristic moments in which Smith, for example, becomes the subject of Bet’s paintings in a voluntary reversal of the “male gaze”. Thus, the two navigate through a complex interplay between intimate opening-up and defensive resistance to intrusive gazes.
Poetry, fairy tales, and myths serve as the grammar of an allegorical visual world that does not relinquish its connection to the here and now but rather offers itself as a model, as a sophisticated tool to address societal problems through radical thinking. From this, Paul DD Smith creates bodies, creatures, and landscapes that are intricately intertwined and impossible to isolate. Specifically, sculptures, paintings, and graphic works emerge that celebrate hybridity in materials, techniques, content, and figures. Wera Bet focuses on sociological questions, some of which are undoubtedly feminist. Through aesthetic strategies, she questions the legitimacy of concepts that define what social norms are, how our desires are acquired and shaped, rather than emerging out of necessity. She thus dissects characteristics that determine individuality.
Both seem to inhabit different worlds. Yet, they strangely converge in the bathroom. There, their painterly works, all possessing a high antinormative power, play out, maintaining belief in the transformative function of art.
-Susanne Prinz
