Abweichende Wuchsverhältnisse

Balzer Projects is exited to welcome Yasmin Alt and Esther Ernst for Abweichende Wuchsverhältnisse, their first exhibition with the gallery. We look forward to welcome you and your friends for the Vernissage on Thursday, January 10, from 18 to 20h.

Abweichende Wuchsverhältnisse is the artists' first collaborative endeavor. Both share an interest in the ephemeral, fragmentary and little noticed. Esther Ernst processes found objects in her drawings while Yasmin Alt is quoting architecture – building small sculptures with pieces of repurposed wood with a history. Both artists create legacies that resemble diaries as well as positioning systems of personal and universal histories.
 
The exhibition highlights work that transcends personal orders and organizations. While urban structures and city environments are analyzed and implemented, the casual and accidental are examined with a private, often intimately personal and autobiographical approach both artists share. Thus, a cautious exchange is encouraged between drawings, found objects, pieces of furniture, wall and room sculptures.
 
Esther Ernst is primarily known for her drawings. Yet, her understanding of the technique goes far beyond the materiality of the paper and “drawing” in the traditional sense of the word. She understands drawing as an ongoing research process of observing and recording, collecting, categorizing and writing. There are different formats - from architectural environments (“Kunst am Bau”), rooms, walls, sheets of paper to the reverse sides of postcards.
 
Folded and fold-out sheets create a reference to books and maps. Sometimes, she draws directly on the wall, combines smaller and larger works on paper with and without frames and builds them into an associative flow. More often than not, her drawings resemble road maps, city plans and directories. Remembrance and the desire to capture what has been experienced can be the basic theme of her creative endeavor.
 
Esther Ernst’s art and personal life are closely related and her biography shows the two basic constants: drawing and traveling. She has worked in residencies in Egypt, Argentina, South Africa and Germany, to mention only a few. It comes as no surprise that her work displays autobiographical elements; she is always on the move – collecting moments, impressions, even interesting scraps of paper. The artist is looking for new challenges, stories, pictures and objects; her collection of international postcards is enormous.

Esther Ernst (*1977, lives and works in Solothurn and Berlin), studied Fine Arts and Stage Design at Art Schools in Zurich, Basel, Hamburg and at the University of the Arts in Berlin. She is working mainly in drawing and is realizing long-term collection projects. She participated in numerous solo and group shows at home and abroad, is presented in various private and institutional art collections and has received several international awards and scholarships. Recently, she won a contest for art in the public space in Basel.

A central aspect of Yasmin Alt’s work is the examination of cultural residues. Her mainly sculptural works are both playful and futuristic objects, whose inspirations are drawn from architecture, interior design and ritual objects of past eras and cultures. Seemingly archaic structures of early industrial architecture and brutalist concrete building are as well an inspiration as antique ruins are. In her work, Yasmin Alt utilizes fundamental architectural principles and construction techniques, fragments them and imposes the question of sense and function to her objects.
 
The heterogenic objects - made out of wood, fiber glass, concrete and various resins - are arranged into three-dimensional collages that describe the pattern of human civilization. In her very own arrangement system, objects are placed in relation to others and stay in this constellation like a key frame for the duration of the exhibition.
 
The simultaneity of the multicultural quotes questions the linearity of history and proposes an alternative cultural report where past and future merge. Her object constellations embody notions of repeating history. Small repair sites on the objects raise the question of the temporal assignment of the objects. Like an archaeological site the arrangement gives us an insight into a world, where modes of conduct and rites are unknown to us. (Text about Yasmin Alt: © Roeckelmann&)

Yasmin Alt (*1978, lives and works in Berlin). She studied Fine Arts (sculpture) and communication design at the academies of Dresden and Mainz. In late 2019, her work will be shown in a solo show at the Kunstverein Trier. She has exhibited her work in various publicly founded exhibition spaces and galleries have presented her sculptures. Her works are part of the collection of the cultural foundation of the free state of Saxony as well as in private collections. She has received several residencies and grants from different cultural foundations and the German Institute for International Cultural Relations.