On Paper

There is something innocent and light in the image of a paper fly like on this invitation .
Just think about a kid playing with it. – What is more suitable for a playful exhibition with
artworks, which are making use of this media in all kind of way? Isn’t paper the basic medium
of making art? There are surely very few artists who never used it in their creative process at
a certain point.
But nevertheless – paper as a medium is not as easy as it seems: Its maybe 2200 year old
history might about to be over. It is definitely in its last chapter. In the old China paper was
something holy and the making of it a carefully protected secret. The Arabs brought it to the
west and with Gutenberg’s letter press machine it got its breakthrough: money, books,
documents, pamphlets, pictures, photos, photocopies. It became the communication media
from the highest to the lowest culture the next 500 years.
Now we are in the middle of a new revolution of communication: More and more information
in our culture becomes digital. The computer displaces paper, which means that a material
information carrier is displaced by a virtual one. We can only guess where it leads. Fact is:
credit cards displace money, kids are using their notebooks instead of exercise books and
David Hockney just demonstrated how great it is to make drawings on his iphone.
So what does paper mean for artists today? There is surely not one answer. But there are
plenty to find in the show at  55 artists  from 13 nations with 4 to 12  works each will show
how lively this media still is and not leave much free space on the wall.
The following artists participate:

Stalke