Galerie Jette Rudolph starts their season in September with a solo show of the Lepzig-based artist, Paule Hammer (b. 1975), his first at this gallery. The show is entitled "World Encyclopedia No.4: Anxiety, Love, Dream" and will introduce a staging of the entire gallery space based on the artist's large and middle sized canvases, text-based installation works and sound sculptures.
Paule Hammer's complex works narrate stories from the ego-perspective with its content centred on the self-image of the individual going through his inner experiences, thoughts, intentions and fantasies. The Berlin show questions the essential necessities around anxiety, love and dream. It is builds on Hammer's stage "Weltenzyklopädie III/ World Encyclopedia III", that formed part of the exhibition "Bilder vom Künstler/ Images from the artist" at the Frankfurter Kunstverein at the beginning of 2010, to locate various social roles & their analysis.
The recent works of the artist focus word and text by means of catchwords taken from the title of the exhibition, which are painted in big letters intertwined in a network of connected 'islands' joined by lines and punctuated with synapse-like (thought-) knots. The recipient is encircled by an endless questionnaire of existential descriptive patterns, made of collages. The black and white canvases, similar to charts on blackboards, describe the word "love" through the terms "community", "violence" as well as "man" and "woman", "animal" and the level of "being", "family" and "body". But only the selective view can penetrate the thick meshwork to feel the lines and isles as parts of the thresholds of the margin and dissolution of sense. The three chapters -"anxiety", "love" and "dream"- are accompanied by a sound sculpture of a cephalopod, with the notations based on a precise translation from word into music created according to the artist's own system. Hammer takes the recipient on a journey into his soul to audio-visualize the limits of non-objective as well as objectified corporeality; stripped in his dreams becoming himself by another self.
Even Hammer's dream diaries (2007-present) serve as a source and archive of the artist's work; experiences of trips, fabulous creatures, political or prominent encounters or inscrutable phenomena which evoked euphoric as well as daunting emotions are assembled in pictorial and plastic elements through collage. The idea of the ornamental and of figuratively describing shapes is summarized in his multi-line texts, the "self-portrait" (Selbstportrait), animals, bodies and flower still lifes. The artist's working process and self-perception is an open exchange of the daily experiences and the order of reality. Consecutively his projections are characterized by a dialogue between the ego and the world, using the words of the German philosopher B. Waldenfels: "each new realization is compiled by the challenge through the other or the foreign, surmounting the existing categories without announcing a general order." (Sinnesschwellen. Studien zur Phänomenologie des Fremden 3, Ffm 1999).