Tales of Traces, Stones and Moonlight
Opening Fri, June 5th, 17:00
The most recent winners of the “junger westen” art prize—Jeewi Lee, Mona Schulzek, and Jeehye Song— are exhibting together at the Villa Romana in Florence. Curated by Dr. Nico Anklam. The exhibition is part of Mutual Presence, an exchange and collaboration project between the Villa Romana in Florence, Italy, and the Kunsthalle Recklinghausen in Germany.
It was a brilliant blue sparkle, like a cold fire, reflected in the semi-darkness on the centuries-old stones, wet and shimmering from the sea. Largely hidden since antiquity, the Blue Grotto was rediscovered in 1826 and subsequently became one of the romantic obsessions of 19th-century German artists. The sea-flooded cave on Capri, illuminated by sunlight filtering through the water, became a central theme in numerous works of art. Early works in particular, such as those by Heinrich Jakob Fried (1835), speak to a fascination with the physical world and its visual phenomena.
But they also bear witness to the poetry of water, stones, and light in a way that only art can. At times, works of art can transport us to every conceivable place—be it to the center of the Earth or out into the infinite cosmos—or they can condense all of this into a single work. Or, to put it another way, was this also characteristic of the era when modernism was gaining momentum: the demystification of untouched nature was followed by its aestheticization (see Richter, Dieter. August Kopisch. Discovery of the Blue Grotto on the Island of Capri. Wagenbach, Berlin, 2009, p. 75).
At first glance, none of the three recent recipients of the Kunsthalle Recklinghausen’s “Kunstpreis junger westen” appears to have a direct connection to German Romanticism or the so-called “longing for Italy” that has so strongly shaped Northern Europe since the late 18th century. At least, that is how it appears. Yet in their fascination with the poetic beauty of volcanic stones and meteorites from space, their curiosity about air bubbles, sand, and waves, or their ability to capture on canvas the picturesque glow of the moon—which could just as easily be the light of a cell phone screen illuminating a face at night—it becomes clear that Lee, Schulzek, and Song are, in surprising ways, akin to the traveling artists of two hundred years ago.
The collaboration between the two institutions, the Kunsthalle Recklinghausen and the Villa Romana in Florence, is titled *Mutual Presence*. It brings together the oldest German art prize of all, awarded by the Villa Romana in Florence, and the oldest postwar art prize, based at the Kunsthalle in a former bunker in the Ruhr region. The works by Jeewi Lee, Mona Schulzek, and Jeehye Song demonstrate, not least, what art is capable of and what we as a society owe to artists: art makes the world so tangible that, even in difficult times, it has always been a place of wonder.
