我对太阳、月亮和星辰的信仰变得非同一般的可爱。没有它和威尼斯，也许我就毁了，因为人们不懂我。我是个差学生、让人憎恶的孩子。
——特奥多尔·多伊布勒 Theodor Däubler ，《北极光》
艾伦·格罗内迈尔 Ellen Gronemeyer
即将到达凡人的巅峰 On the way to the peak of normal, 2023
纸本油画 Oil on oil paper
32 × 24 cm
LINSEED将于2023年9月22日至11月1日呈现艺术家艾伦·格罗内迈尔（Ellen Gronemeyer）在亚洲的首次个展“睡着也好，醒来也罢”。格罗内迈尔生于冷战时期的西德，见证德国、世界与人们生活中发生的巨变。虽然这里好像到处都是稍显扭曲的脸，无数眼睛在暧昧不明的画面上各有所指，格罗内迈尔的画面却不是一个逃离现实生活的狂欢蒙面舞会。相反，这些稚气的形象、拟人的植物和生物都指向一个梦与醒之间的世界，或用艺术家的的话来说“这是一种很特殊的睡梦，那里与日常生活仍紧紧相联”。这种状态下似乎情感的光谱得以最完整的展现，格罗内迈尔的创作亦即试图捕捉这种状态下丰富的感觉。如果以情感去度量真实，那么格罗内迈尔的画布似乎不再代表着画面内部世界的终结。
艾伦·格罗内迈尔 Ellen Gronemeyer
更猛的威力 A Higher Power, 2023
布面油画 Oil on canvas
四联 Quadriptych
70 × 102 cm each
70 × 408 cm overall
此次展览中，观众被格罗内迈尔的厚涂笔触所产生的一种甜腻的诱人气息捕获，应邀来到艺术家的奇幻乐园。花朵、泡泡、气球和蛋糕，这些人畜无害、单纯又惹人怜爱的事物充斥着这一系列作品，与画面中非主流艺术（Art Brut）的生涩、稚嫩和缤纷特质相呼应。连火箭也显得笨钝，好像不太会飞。然而，格罗内迈尔看似胡乱的笔触搅动画面，致其变成一片令人失去方向的形状，使得观众无法像预料的那样亲近作品。在油彩涂抹的下方划过幽灵般的线条，让人想起恩斯特·路德维希·基尔希纳（Ernst Ludwig Kirchner）的蜡笔速写，提醒着观众这些看似可爱的对象与构图实则来自一场快速惊异的表达和长时间的堆叠过程。这样的视觉强度让她的描绘达到变形的地步，拒绝兑现我们训练有素、极其擅长区分无害和有害的目光。
艾伦·格罗内迈尔 Ellen Gronemeyer
我们是如何相遇的 How We Met, 2023
布面油画 Oil on canvas
102 × 80 cm
然而当观众更仔细地审视这些主题与其周围环境之间的互动时，令人不安的距离逐渐消失。最显著的是在《更猛的威力》中，乍看下的白色好像试图立刻将自己与黑色背景区别开，但火箭主体上的杂色与黑暗中若隐若现荧光色和谐共振。尽管火箭看起来很巨大，但它并不是入侵者而是一个可变形的生物，友好地与莫测的宇宙交个朋友。巨大的东西也变得没有威胁性。格罗内迈尔的作品仿佛向我们提出这样一个问题：当我们认为那东西人畜无害的时候，究竟是那东西天生的无力，还是他向一个无区分的世界所毫无顾虑地展示的脆弱——辜负则是我们的无能。
艾伦·格罗内迈尔 Ellen Gronemeyer
王公贵妇 Lords and Ladies, 2022
布面油画 Oil on canvas
130 × 140 cm
格罗内迈尔的作品偏爱那些眼睛，或用Daniela Dröscher评论时说的：孩子的目光（child’s gaze），它们不假区分，才使得那个世界还原成原初的样子。不仅如此，他们是如此的擅于捕捉和表达不同的情感：在《分屏》中他们夸张的表示好奇，在《王公贵妇》中则潜藏在花蕊里。于是，《新平衡》中的点和圆，甚至是格罗内迈尔的每一个表达的笔触都好像变成了眼睛。这样一种看似像是梦境的编织，或许正如哈尔·福斯特（Hal Foster）所说，它“并非对真实进行干扰或者去神秘化，而是使真实再次真实，也就是说，再次有效，再次被感受。”[1]
[1] 哈尔·福斯特，“真实的虚构：论’替代事实’的替代方案”，Artforum，2017年4月， https://www.artforum.com/print/201704/real-fictions-alternatives-to-alternative-facts-67192。
艾伦·格罗内迈尔 Ellen Gronemeyer
留下 Stay, 2022
布面油画 Oil on canvas
120 × 91 cm
艾伦·格罗内迈尔 Ellen GRONEMEYER
艾伦·格罗内迈尔1979年出生于德国，2005年毕业于德国汉堡美术学院(Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg), 现工作生活于德国柏林。格罗内迈尔曾任教于伦敦切尔西艺术与设计学院（Chelsea College of Arts and Design），自2017年至今, 她被任命为杜塞尔多夫艺术学院（Kunstakademie Düsseldorf）绘画系教授。
艾伦·格罗内迈尔 Ellen Gronemeyer
新平衡 New Balance, 2014
布面油画 Oil on canvas
120 × 140 cm
格罗内迈尔的虚构形象交织于想象与现实的矛盾, 呈现出诙谐混合怪诞的场景。其作品中带有腐蚀感却又似乎在繁殖增长的灰调、粗厚的质地、相互缠绕的细节复合成充满活力和闪烁的视觉密度，若隐若现的光芒感则来自艺术家对色彩与技法的独特运用——以黑白灰为基调，始于一层层明亮的颜色，逐步盖上渐深的层叠。格罗内迈耶将漫画式的失真效果与寻常事物搀杂，在一个看似不合逻辑的世界里，异想形象被她转变为自己内心世界中开放可能性的主角；游走在虚实之间、童趣与成熟的罅隙，创造出了她鲜明风格的图像，亦与法国野兽派、表现主义的形式有着异曲同工之妙。
艾伦·格罗内迈尔 Ellen Gronemeyer
分屏 Split Screen, 2022
布面油画 Oil on canvas
70 × 60 cm
艾伦·格罗内迈尔 Ellen Gronemeyer
湮没的涌动 Submerged flow, 2022
布面油画 Oil on canvas
70 × 60 cm
其近期主要个展和项目包括: “睡着也好 , 醒来也罢”, 2023, LINSEED, 上海 (即将展出); “Switch”, 2023, Galerie Karin Guenther, 汉堡; “Tausendmal Du”, 2021, Anton Kern Gallery, 纽约; “Midnight magic wild summer”, 2020, greengrassi, 伦敦 ; “Frozen”, 2018, Anton Kern Gallery, 纽约 ; “Bochum”, 2017, Kimmerich, 柏 林 ; “Plankton”, 2017, Galerie Karin Guenther, 汉堡 ; “keine Minute Ruhe”, 2015, greengrassi, 伦敦 ; “Sweethearts", 2015, kimmerich, 柏林 ; “Watchever”, 2014, Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst, 亚 琛 ; “Affentheater", 2012, Dennis Kimmerich, 纽约 ; “I have a difficult childhood”, 2012, greengrassi, 伦敦 ; “CDU/ CSU”, 2011, Galerie Karin Guenther, 汉堡 ; “Zeitsichtpreis 2010”, 2010, Schätzlepalais, 奥格斯堡。其近期主要群展包括: “OUR WEEK”, 2023, LINSEED, 首尔; 巴塞尔艺术展, 2023, Anton Kern Gallery, 巴塞尔 ; “Sarah Braman, Ellen Gronemeyer, Margherita Manzelli, Alice Tippit”, 2022, Linn Lühn, Düsseldorf (in cooperation with Kimmerich) ; “Tales of Manhattan”, 2021, Anton Kern Gallery, 纽约 ; “混音漫步”, 2021, LINSEED, 上海 ; “Realism with Ribbon”, 2019, Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof, 汉堡; “Ellen Gronemeyer, DeborahRemington, Torsten Slama, Alice Tippit”, 2018, Kimmerich, 柏林 ; “Utopias are more or less fascistic”, 2017, Nicolas Krupp, 巴塞尔 ; “A Slow Succession with Many Interruptions”, 2016, 旧金山现代艺术博物馆, 旧金山 ; “NAK Benefizauktion”, 2016, Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, 亚琛 ; “To lie in the cheese, to smile in the butter”, 2016, Kunstsaele, 柏林 ; “SURRREAL”, 2016, Johann König, Berlin; “Le Souffleur”, 2016, Ludwig Forum für Int. Kunst, 亚琛 ; “Raw and Delirious”, 2015, Kunsthalle, 伯尔尼 ; “100 Painters of Tomorrow,” 2014, 伦敦当代艺术中心, 伦敦 ; “Painting Forever!”, 2013, KW, 柏林 ; “Hysteria, Laughter and a sense of Seriousness“, 2011, Gregor Staiger, 苏黎世 ; “Capitain Pamphile”, 2011, Sammlung Falkenberg, 汉堡 ; “Big minis”, 2010, 波尔多CAPC当代艺术博物馆, (curated by Alexis Valliant), 波尔多。
My belief in the sun, moon, and stars became incredibly lovely. Without it and Venice, maybe I would be ruined because people wouldn’t understand me. I was a bad student and a detestable kid.
—— Theodor Däubler (Das Nordlicht/The Northern Lights
LINSEED is thrilled to present Ellen Gronemeyer’s first solo show in Aisa, Forty Winks, from September 22 to November 1, 2023. Gronemeyer was born in the late 70s in West Germany and has witnessed the sociocultural transformation of the nation, the world, and the people. Though crowded with distorted facial features and eyes blinking on the murky canvas, Gronemeyer’s playground is not an ecstatic masked ball opposite to reality with extreme revelry. The childlike figures, as well as anthropomorphic plants and creatures, gesture towards an imagined world in a nap, or “forty winks", which for the artist is “a very specific kind of sleep when you are still connected with day-to-day life.” At its core, Gronemeyer explores a kaleidoscope of emotions that spontaneously and unreservedly manifest in this liminal state. If the real is measured by the intensity of feelings, Gronemeyer's picture plane no longer seems to represent the end of the canvas.
Instantaneously impressed by Gronemeyer’s impasto evincing a cloying charm, the viewers are invited to the giddy wonderland of her paintings. Paralleling art brut’s raw and kitsch attributes in Gronemeyer's paintings, innocuous and endearing if not childish themes like flowers, bubbles, balloons, and cupcakes are ubiquitous in these works. Even the rocket is obtuse apically. Nevertheless, we feel distanced from the canvas as a cluster of strokes churns up the surface into a totality of disorienting shapes. Underneath the daubs are the phantom-like lines fleeting, reminiscent of the crayon sketches by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. The cuteness in Gronemeyer’s work paradoxically stems from an expressive composition and a time-based process. The visual intensity takes her depictions to the point of deformation that defies our trained gaze adept at distinguishing the innocuous and the nocuous.
The disturbing distance gradually dissolves as the viewer takes closer scrutiny of the resonance between these subjects and their environs. Most significantly in A Higher Power where the white color distinguishes itself from the black background at first sight, the variegated shades on the body of the rocket rhythm harmoniously with the looming yet strident colors in the dark. It is not an intruder but a transformable creature befriending the unfathomable space. Monstrous as the rocket may seem, it is innocuous. To this end, Gronemeyer's work seems to raise the question: When we perceive someone or something as innocuous, is it their powerless nature, or is it the vulnerability they never bother to hide from an undifferentiated world? To distinguish is the powerlessness.
The non-distinguishing eyes, or the child’s gaze as Daniela Dröscher has suggested, are prevalent features in Gronemeyer’s oeuvre, which make an undifferentiated universe possible. However, latent in Lords and Ladies and exaggerated in Split Screen with their bulged eyeballs, these eyes are so potent in encompassing different and nuanced types of feelings. To this point, we may find every dot and circle in New Balance or even every stroke Gronemeyer expressively brushes is a symbolic eye. As Hal Foster commented on the fabrications of alternative and dreamy reality, it is “not to demystify or to disrupt the real but to make the real real again, which is to say, effective again, felt again, as such.”[1]
[1] Hal Foster, Real Fictions: Alternatives to Alternative Facts, ArtForum 2017/04, https://www.artforum.com/print/201704/real-fictions-alternatives-to-alternative-facts-67192
Ellen GRONEMEYER was born in 1979 in Germany. She graduated from Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg in 2005, and currently lives and works in Berlin, Germany. She has taught at the Chelsea College of Arts and Design in London, and has been appointed the Junior Professor of Painting at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf since 2017. Gronemeyer's fictional images are intertwined with the contradictions of imagination and reality, resulting in scenes of humor mixed with the grotesque. The corrosive yet seemingly multiplying shades of gray, thick textures, and interlacing details in her works are compounded into a vibrant and shimmering visual density, with an ambiguous sense of radiance that comes from the artist's unique use of color and technique—on the base of black, white, and gray, she starts with layers of bright colors, and gradually covers with a darkening of the layers. Gronemeyer combines comic distortion with the ordinary in a deceptively illogical world, transforming whimsical images into the protagonists open to the possibilities of her inner world. Wandering across fantasy and reality, and between naiveté and sophistication, she creates her distinctive style of imagery that resonates with French Fauvist and Expressionist gestures.
Ellen GRONEMEYER‘s work has been exhibited in several international major institutions and art galleries, including Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (San Francisco), Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof (Hamburg), Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst (Aachen), KW (Berlin), Sammlung Falkenberg (Hamburg), musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux (Bordeaux). Her work is held in notable collections including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst, Aachen; Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland and Hammer Museum of Art, Los Angeles.
Her recent selected solo exhibitions include: “Forty Winks”, 2023, LINSEED, Shanghai (upcoming); “Switch”, 2023, Galerie Karin Guenther, Hamburg; “Tausendmal Du”, 2021, Anton Kern Gallery, New York; “Midnight magic wild summer”, 2020, greengrassi, London; “Frozen”, 2018, Anton Kern Gallery, New York; “Bochum”, 2017, Kimmerich, Berlin; “Plankton”, 2017, Galerie Karin Guenther, Hamburg; “keine Minute Ruhe”, 2015, greengrassi, London; “Sweethearts", 2015, kimmerich, Berlin; “Watchever”, 2014, Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst, Aachen; “Affentheater", 2012, Dennis Kimmerich, New York; “I have a difficult childhood”, 2012, greengrassi, London; “CDU/ CSU”, 2011, Galerie Karin Guenther, Hamburg; “Zeitsichtpreis 2010”, 2010, Schätzlepalais, Augsburg. Her selected group exhibitions include: “OUR WEEK”, 2023, LINSEED, Seoul; Art Basel, 2023, Anton Kern Gallery, Basel; “Sarah Braman, Ellen Gronemeyer, Margherita Manzelli, Alice Tippit”, 2022, Linn Lühn, Düsseldorf (in cooperation with Kimmerich) ; “Tales of Manhattan”, 2021, Anton Kern Gallery, New York; “Andante Remix”, 2021, LINSEED, Shanghai; “Realism with Ribbon”, 2019, Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof, Hamburg; “Ellen Gronemeyer, Deborah Remington, Torsten Slama, Alice Tippit”, 2018, Kimmerich, Berlin; “Utopias are more or less fascistic”, 2017, Nicolas Krupp, Basel; “A Slow Succession with Many Interruptions”, 2016, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; “NAK Benefizauktion”, 2016, Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, Aachen; “To lie in the cheese, to smile in the butter”, 2016, Kunstsaele, Berlin; “SURRREAL”, 2016, Johann König, Berlin; “Le Souffleur”, 2016, Ludwig Forum für Int. Kunst, Aachen; “Raw and Delirious”, 2015, Kunsthalle, Bern ; “100 Painters of Tomorrow,” 2014, ICA, London; “Painting Forever!”, 2013, KW, Berlin; “Hysteria, Laughter and a sense of Seriousness“, 2011, Gregor Staiger, Zurich; “Capitain Pamphile”, 2011, Sammlung Falkenberg, Hamburg; “Big minis”, 2010, musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux, (curated by Alexis Valliant), Bordeaux.
