Hannes Broecker’s chief interest lies in the language of symbols and the aesthetics of public space. In his work prevailing classification systems and urban structures are translated and abstracted. He takes graffiti and slogans, colour codes from billboards and construction hoarding, reflective and crumbling façades that tell of power and powerlessness, and transforms them into painted images.

In a world chock-full of conventional presentations, his sculptures and installations seem to be even more of a balancing act between aggression and seduction than do his pictures: They obstruct entryways and defy insight, yet they entice the observer with the vivid force of strong colors as well as with unusual surfaces and materials.

Despite the growing importance of installations in Jan Brokof’s work, he remains, first and foremost, a graphic artist. His preferred techniques include graphite pencil drawing, black-ink painting, and woodcutting. Memories and biographical elements in his oeuvre are increasingly being superseded by street scenes he has observed or learned about, and which accompany him in his daily experiences and imagination. With these themes, Brokof enters a new dimension in the artistic exploration of his everyday life, more detached from the concrete subject. His analysis of surfaces in three-dimensional space becomes highly charged, and colour comes gradually into play.

Laura Bielau (born 1981; lives and works in Leipzig)

In her series Color Lab Club, Laura Bielau explores the history of photography and her own relationship to the medium. She highlights the disappearance of old processes and techniques, photographing equipment and tools that will soon vanish completely from photographers’ everyday working lives.

miR. grabe (born 1971; lives and works in Marseille, France)

The artist miR. grabe delves into the cityscape, seeking hidden and invisible sculptural forms. His tireless zeal for abstraction and the manifold possibilities of the pinhole camera come together to form minimalist and reduced images of urban habitats.

JAN VON HOLLEBEN (born 1977; lives and works in Berlin and London, Great Britain)

In his new series Microhumanoids, Jan von Holleben constructs apparent realities with a language of images that is as powerful as it is playful. These mischievous and creative works, with their ironic take on sociological studies, were produced in a workshop as scientific simulations of microorganisms.

ERIK NIEDLING (born 1973; lives and works in Berlin)

In his photo series entitled Formation, Erik Niedling works with historical material from the photographer Albert Renger-Patzsch, one of the leading figures of New Objectivity in Germany. In doing so, Niedling plays with the points where notions such as ‘positive’ and ‘negative’, ‘historical’ and ‘new’ intersect, thus referring in a subtle fashion to the history of photography.

YUKI ONODERA (born 1962; lives and works in Paris, France)

The series Look out the window by Japanese artist Yuki Onodera consists of works of delicate and distilled aestheticism. With her light installations, Onodera takes newly constructed buildings without a history or future and endows them with an aura of life by making reference to the people who live within them and their moods.

KATJA STOYE-CETIN (born 1975; lives and works in Berlin)

Katja Stoye-Cetin explores anew the modernist vocabulary of forms, eschewing all spatial effects in the process. By directly illuminating photographic paper and using semi-transparent sheets of plastic, the artist creates geometric compositions of light—a distilled universe of luminous bands of colour and circular forms on a dark background.

In addition, Stefan Lenke’s fascination with speed, and with the fusion of images and time, gives reason to compare his matte, silver-grey tones with the black-and-white of television or photographic images. We may also see contemporary visual experiences within his blurred and unfocused colour fields, or think of modern techniques of image editing or composition, including pixilated digital surfaces.

Yet these comparisons with technical artificiality also put the warmth and authenticity of painting in general, and of Stefan Lenke’s work in particular, in clear relief. The calm, velvet depth of the pigment-rich paint with its intense shine on the one hand, or its floating, dry colour layers on the other, illustrate palpably the intense work required in applying colour layers. It is easy to see a musical parallel in terminology such as a ‘velvety lower range’ or ‘intensity’. (Birgit Dalbajewa, abstract of a text in catalogue Stefan Lenke: works 2005-2008)

With the show Facebook galerie baer presents a gruop show which was conceived by the drawing lab and presents the theme of Portraiture in drawing. The exhibition presents a broad spectrum of drawing, from watercolours on paper to animated drawing videos, everything that this diverse medium can represent. In all areas of Art History, the genre of Portraiture has played an imminent, central role. The portrait can be a reflection of the self, the self as another, the expression of society as a whole and simultaniously plays with the personal and very subjective view of the Artist. Facebook presents 22 International Artist’s diverse creative positions and will be exhibited in different venues in Berlin, München and Dresden amongst other locations to be certified.

Taking his vision of movement, aestetically as well as formally, into account, Sebastian Hempel takes direct influence onto the statial perception and sensual experience of the viewer. The artist often works room-orientated, animates tennis balls to jump, floors to move and flourescent lamps to dance. The viewer is actively taking part experiencing the phenomenon of movement through the artists\' installations. Perception is directly proportional to the measure of time. The pictorial character joins works of art although they are subject to permanent transformation. The front room of the gallery is dominated by kinetic wall objects with a partly graphical effect. Through the central corridor the visitor is followed by an installation like a shadow. The large room of the gallery at the back is dominated by a light tower which seems to be wanting to grow out of the gallery roof.

Sebastian Hempel was born in Dresden in 1971 and a master student of Ursula Sax at the academy of arts in Dresden until 2000. Among other places the artist exhibited at the Kunsthaus Dresden, Städtische Galerie Dresden, Städtisches Museum Zwikau, Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig, Städtische Galerie Nordhorn, Künstlerhaus Dortmund, Kunstsammlungen Gera, Kasseler Kunstverein, Nationalgalerie Prag, Art Forum Berlin, Art Cologne and Art Basel. 

Under the title »The Good Times Are Killing Me« Stefanie Busch presents new work which visualizes, in the form of a repository of images, her observations of the current regression in the US. During a stay of several months in the American Midwest she folded together a self-reflexive analysis of her status as an artist with the self-evident images of a system still functioning despite signs of decay and dilapidation.

VACANT: The financial crisis is most clearly evident in the vacated and deserted properties in the (sub)urban cities of the Midwest. Here vacant means an uncertain future, a clearing away, a tearing down of houses or market correction. The codes and signs of the regression fit into Stefanie Busch’s coming to terms with the status quo of art and the business of art; she picks up on them in her new works. In »The Good Times Are Killing Me« she presents screen-prints, photographs, and ink-drawings. The source material for the new works are newspaper articles, city maps, empty advertising hoardings, architecture, but also the common or garden situations of everyday American life. Common to the subject matter is the unspectacular, the peripheral. Here Stefanie Busch searches beneath the great surface, beyond the US metropolises, for interesting and marginal realities which, however, probably portray more realistically and concretely the everyday society.

The artist is fascinated by the pragmatic interaction with the traces of the regression, for example in Detroit. A former opera house is rededicated as a parking garage; the resulting melancholia is repressed by the unconventional and concretely practical refunctioning. The effects of the crisis of capitalism become clear, but they are unpretentiously recycled by the inhabitants of this huge, emptied-out city as they get on with attempting solutions. A quiet optimism, anger and creativity inhere in the interaction with the urban wasteland – not for nothing has this led to the city becoming the birthplace of techno and of urban agriculture.

»The Good Times Are Killing Me« was inspired by the observations of the country which Simone de Beauvoir works through in her 1947 work America Day By Day (Amerika Tag und Nacht, literally »America Day and Night«). Stefanie Busch has created a diary which draws upon encounters, walks, and research. She continuously adds to her archive of photos, from which she then peels out the subject matter and codes of the days and nights of today‘s America. Her subsequent cutting-up, printing, overlaying, and re-staging of these pictures both reinforce and overstate contemporary America.

VACANT: The financial crisis is most clearly evident in the vacated and deserted properties in the (sub)urban cities of the Midwest. Here vacant means an uncertain future, a clearing away, a tearing down of houses or market correction. The codes and signs of the regression fit into Stefanie Busch’s coming to terms with the status quo of art and the business of art; she picks up on them in her new works. In »The Good Times Are Killing Me« she presents screen-prints, photographs, and ink-drawings. The source material for the new works are newspaper articles, city maps, empty advertising hoardings, architecture, but also the common or garden situations of everyday American life. Common to the subject matter is the unspectacular, the peripheral. Here Stefanie Busch searches beneath the great surface, beyond the US metropolises, for interesting and marginal realities which, however, probably portray more realistically and concretely the everyday society.

The artist is fascinated by the pragmatic interaction with the traces of the regression, for example in Detroit. A former opera house is rededicated as a parking garage; the resulting melancholia is repressed by the unconventional and concretely practical refunctioning. The effects of the crisis of capitalism become clear, but they are unpretentiously recycled by the inhabitants of this huge, emptied-out city as they get on with attempting solutions. A quiet optimism, anger and creativity inhere in the interaction with the urban wasteland – not for nothing has this led to the city becoming the birthplace of techno and of urban agriculture.