Martin Klimas

Foley Gallery is pleased to announce Temporary Sculpture, an exhibition of photographs by German artist Martin Klimas. This show marks his first exhibition in the United States.

By carefully controlling his studio environment, but leaving actions to chance, Klimas creates images that hold a moment containing the past, present and future of his subject. We see what was known, what is now and what will become. Yet, the moment he shares is one that we could normally not optically register.

With a strobe light and one sheet of film, Klimas captures each individual experience of porcelain figurines being dropped and obliterated. With fixed expressions, these statuettes fall to their fragile demise. But Klimas is less interested in the violence of the scene and more interested in the action as an organized narrative process that creates new informal structures.

His Photographs explore the ephemera of moments and material objects. An object that can be intact and so serene one minute can easily be destabilized and turned into an animated and fragmented entity. The figurines display a perpetual sense of motion, which in the cases of more action-oriented figures like the kung fu fighters exaggerates the action that the character is already implying. For the figures that are more passive in expression, this explosive aspect adds a disruptive quality to an otherwise staid object.

The intention of this process is the creation of an entity that is the result of the action. Every picture becomes a sculpture on its own, showing the transformation of an object that no longer exists into a stationary object that we can only, for the moment, imagine. There is a comforting idea amidst what appears to be violence and chaos, which is the concept that this destruction can ultimately result in creation.

Martin Klimas received his diploma at the Fachhochschule Düsseldorf in 2000. His work has been exhibited gallery in galleries in Berlin, Düsseldorf and Hamburg. This will be his first exhibition in the United States.

  • Foley Gallery

    • "Believers & Illusionists"


    “Believers & Illusionists”

    Preview through gallery weekend possible

    Vårin Andersen (N), Jan Christensen (N),Santiago Cucullu (AR)
    Halina Kliem (DE), Josefine Lyche (N), Frode Markhus (N),Marius Martinusen (N)
    Yorgos Sapountzis (GR), Anders Smebye (N) & Norbert Erwin Witzgall (DE)

    R.T. HANSEN
    Gormansstrasse 19 A. 10119 Berlin

    Curated by: Lars Morell

  • Lars Morell

  • Inc Berlin

    • Alice Neel


    Portrait painter Alice Neel (1900-1984) was a self-described collector of souls who recorded her sitters on canvas through six decades of the 20th century, among them Andy Warhol, Bella Abzug, Allen Ginsberg and Annie Sprinkle. Neel always sought the”authentic”, moving from Greenwich Village to Spanish Harlem just as the Village was gaining reputation in the art scene. She sacrificed almost everything for her art, delving so far into the psyches of her sitters she would almost lose herself. Yet Neel was also a dedicated mother, raising two sons in the bohemian world she inhabited. Filmmaker Andrew Neel, Alice Neel’s grandson, puts together the pieces ofthe painter’s life using intimate one-on-one interviews with Neel’s surviving family and personal archival video. The documentary explores the artist’s tumultuous biography and the legacy of Alice Neel’s determination to paint her era.

  • Art Projx

  • Aliceneel Film

  • Seethink

  • Victoria Miro

    • John Hodany


    JOHN HODANY
    “WORKS ON PAPER”
    April 27 – May 19, 2007

    Opening Reception with the Artist Friday, April 27, 6-9 p.m.

    For his first Scandinavian solo exhibition John Hodany shows a series of 5 large-scale works on paper.

    In these paintings, John Hodany uses repetition, creating patterns and then breaking them using his own painstaking process of cutting and relocating areas of the painting. This creates a ghost-like impression in which the trace of the image that has been cut and replaced seems to imprint on the background. Time, space, landscape and architecture interact and reiterate. The effect of the broken or inverted patterns brings to mind the way a song by the Velvet Underground can solidly depend on a left-out drum beat.

    In his own words John Hodany is interested in “the combination of drawing, painting and sculpture into one complex form”. John Hodany was born 1974 in New York and lives and works in New York and Berlin. His work has recently been acquired by The Museum of Modern Art in New York.

  • Galleri Loyal

    • Jani Hanninen


    Jani Hänninen (born 1974), an angry young man, whose graffiti-based relaxed paintings are tinged by a critical attitude, black humour, engaging irony and an urban beat.

    A portfolio titled “Black Dreams” containing four silk screen prints has been published by Galerie Anhava in conjunction with the exhibition.

  • Anhava