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ANDREA PICHL
ausschließlich oder
31.01.2012 – 10.03.2012
Opening: Saturday, 28. January 2012, 6-9 pm
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click the picture to launch gallery
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KROME Gallery presents new sculptural works and drawings by Berlin-based artist Andrea Pichl in
a show entitled “ausschießlich oder”.
Spatially based art-installations by Andrea Pichl are questioning the architectural concepts of
home and living space contrived by Modernism and still influential nowadays.
The exhibition leads with a group of large scale sculptures: “zwischen”. The title refers to the
peculiar capsule of void, coming into being as a neither foreseen nor wanted space in-between
when a right-angled prefab slab building is erected next to a less regular pre-war apartment house.
As a rule, the gaps are usually hidden from sight with a cover-up extension of the facade. The rustic
plywood models of Andrea Pichl visualise the ulterior bowels of this spatial phenomenon of urban
habitat, revealing the confluence of the standardised and the heterogenous in its aloof coherence
and dynamic irregularity.
The sculptural work “weg“ deals with a particular aspect of Berlin’s architectural history - the
recently demolished building of DDR Ministry of Housing. Plasterboards cladded with black and
white detail shots of the edifice are arranged in an installation, which explore the principles of
panelised building systems through the lens of fragility and deconstruction.
“Wieder“ is a sequel to Andrea Pichl’s installation “doublebind”, commissioned by Hamburger
Bahnhof, Museum of Contemporary Art, Berlin for the thematic exhibition “Architektonika”. The
minimalistic sculpture, more than two meters high, is a reflection on the WBS 70, the meanwhile
notorious DDR era prefab housing series for studio and one bedroom flats. Composed as an
architectural model at a 1:6 scale, the installation renders the ground-plans of the building as a
rhythmically mesmerising, but socially depressing metamorphose of living space.
The sculptural works are accompanied by a series of drawings. These are pencil studies of building
facades - a repetitive litany of patterns cast in concrete panels, and a vague notion of the fragile
human lives behind them.
“Standardised construction models have had a grotesquely dysfunctional impact on the living
space. Andrea Pichl focuses on isolated details of normative architecture as peculiarities
inexplicable from the viewpoint of rationalism, and turns them into sculptural ensembles.
Irregularities, which normally are not expected to be there, but are still present like the
preposterous survival of some almost extinct habitat, are in term used as a basis for a new artistic
system. The inherent paradoxes of such a methodology, which reduce the standardised and
repetitive architectural components to absurdity, are also present in the title of her latest
exhibition: ‘ausschließlich oder’.” (Ludwig Seyfarth)