EXHIBITION SYNOPSIS

Gallery 38 is pleased to announce the opening of “elements” by Hartmut Landauer, marking his first solo exhibition in Japan.

Hartmut Landauer was born in Gemmrigheim, Germany in 1966. In 1995, he acquired a bachelor degree in the Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design, Stuttgart, Germany. After that, he lived and worked in Mexico, South Africa, Ecuador, Spain, and he currently lives and works in Stuttgart, Germany.

In Koumi machi, where Hartmut Landauer spent the summer working, he found the necessary stillness and magical setting for his new work series that combine painting with sculpture and show other hybrid forms between two- and three dimensional materials and media fusion concepts. Japanese influences are perceptible in these new works and some of them may be called innovative for his art.

The new minimalistic collage series made from vintage LP cover cut-outs, mounted on layers of used coloured cardboard sheets are based on single two-coloured units that - combined with others of their kind - become complex towering assemblages of unexpected accidental tonal harmonies and disharmonies.

Folded at their conjoined edges these 'dyad segments', Landauer's elements, become the basic building parts for his objects that oscillate subtly between the second and the third dimension.

One of the new features in his work is a variation of these objects using painted plywood pieces (from his own collection of antique and new, both German and Japanese plywood boards), that the artist has sawn out by hand and conjoined with glued linen straps on the reverse side. Without intricate planning, these works evolve within a continuous informal process of assembling and disassembling, painting and overpainting until the work of art is eventually banned in one of a million possible states.

The evidence of discarded and fragmented found material, its destruction and reinterpretation provide

many plausible connotations in order to interpret Hartmut Landauer's art. Metamorphoses have been a

central motif in his work for several years. The materials undergo stages of destruction and alteration to finally become transmutated beings, which are liberated from the original material, and come into existence on their own behalf.

Both in the Japanese Godai philosophy and in some ancient European elementary philosophies, the nature theory of the five elements earth, water, fire, wind and void are philosophical abstract principles of views and reflections of nature - and of human life and actions according to natural processes.

To Hartmut Landauer there is a holistic point of view to all aspects in life - this is true for both his art and his personal life. The archaic creative determination to 'alter the given world' is immanent in human nature. To Landauer making art is about creating for this determination to discover the unknown within oneself.

One could say that some of the works imply depictions of nature in a certain abstract tradition of modernist avantgarde - and of course in a subtle, almost unconscious manner as their colours and shapes might suggest. But how is nature to be understood in these works? One answer may be given by Willi Baumeister, an important representant of classical modernism. In his words, art does not mean copying nature, instead it creates like nature does: in an evolutionary process of which the artist is a part of. And this non-naturalistic but nature-like art holds the secret of stored time. Because instead of keeping in with the linear time's arrow of modernity, Landauer's objects counter it with the "honeycomb structure" observed by Gaston Bachelard saying: "In its thousand honeycombs, space stores condensed time." Hartmut Landauers works are in a constant process of change - like time that is layered in space.