IMPOSSIBLE
ImPOSSIBLE pays homage to the power of the imaginary and presents artworks that envision the impossible as an alternative way of approaching our increasingly deceptive reality—with a healthy dose of irony and humor.
March 2 – May 26, 2024
Including works ranging from Yves Klein and Sigmar Polke to renowned photographers Jeff Wall, Thomas Demand, and Andreas Gursky, from Anish Kapoor and Fischli/Weiss to younger artists such as Alexandra Bircken, Aylin Langreuter, Loretta Lux, and Goshka Macuga, the show explores the very foundations of art and image-making, delving into a belief in art’s power and potential for displacing and creating everything—places and times, the proportions of things and their interconnections—anew.
Unbridled creativity was believed to be a source of change and criticism of the status quo. Today, human imagination is opening up entire new worlds: the mediazation and digitization of our age as well as various image generators inspire a profusion of new visual fantasies.
The exhibition explores the different routes followed by artists who have given free rein to their imagination in recent years—in painting as well as in film and spatial installations. The result is a staging of the concentrated power of the imagination that touches on and thinks the impossible, securing substantial spaces of freedom for art in which subjective and artistic, serious and ironic, as well as social and political issues are addressed.
In context of the glut of digital images that has grown exponentially in recent years due to the dynamics of social media and new technologies, the exhibition ImPOSSIBLE is an eye-opening and astonishing survey that leads viewers through enigmatic and mysterious universes of images and objects that were issued from an elementary, history-related, and so to speak ironic and humorous understanding of art.
Belgian artist Wim Delvoye presents a Gothic-style truck, while his compatriot video artist David Claerbout reverses time, making a tree grow backward. Famed Conceptualist Yves Klein undertakes a seemingly risky attempt at flying, and photographer Andreas Gursky captures the exhilaration of speed in his monumental panoramas of Formula One races. They all experiment with unusual approaches to making images, enabling them to elegantly maneuver beyond the limitations of the laws of reality.
German philosopher Theodor W. Adorno viewed art as an “offspring of magic,” an authority that divided the sacred from the everyday and dictated keeping it pure. Like magic, art is subordinated to a sphere of its own laws, which are absolved from the laws of the secular and the everyday. Art does not claim to be the truth; it makes proposals in an intrinsic “language” that defines its exclusive power and influence. Curator Alexander Timtschenko notes that color is one step ahead of words; the unique potential of this concept will be revealed in this exhibition.