Art Cologne 2024, Booth A322
with Alan Schmalz, Lou Masduraud and Niels Trannois
07.11.-10.11.2024
Installation views
Photos: Choreo / Courtesy: the artists and Windhager von Kaenel
Text
For
Art Cologne 2024, Windhager von Kaenel proposes a selection of works by artists
Alan Schmalz (*1987), Lou Masduraud (*1990), and Niels Trannois (*1976) that
circle around the theme of symbols and language as power-machinery but also as
tools of mediation and transmission, presented in a shared booth with Galerie
Clages.In Switzerland, there are four national languages: German, French, Italian, and Romansch. Travelling from Zurich to Lugano by train already gives a sense of transitioning to Italy. Meanwhile, people from the Geneva region refer to the German-speaking part of Switzerland as Swiss Alémanique. Despite the 1,935 km-long border surrounding Switzerland that defines the country’s edges, its four languages not only create divides within but also connect across borders. Like language, art can serve as a bridge and reconcile people through the sensory – color, symbols, sound, images, sculptures, installations, smells, presence, or absence. By bringing artists from France and Switzerland to Cologne, Windhager von Kaenel aims to celebrate neighborhood and to initiate a dialogue about language in its ability to transcend boundaries.
Crafted with pencil, ink, watercolor, adhesive tape, and Letraset labels, Alan Schmalz’s works often evoke historical elements brought back to life with mystery and poetry. By highlighting traces of the past, Schmalz’s drawings and collages serve as a form of resistance to the constant pursuit of progress and modernity, offering an alternative perspective to rethink our society.
What is sometimes advertised as protection from burglary might just as well be seen as something that holds us captive. Thick steel bars made of ceramic dissolve into jewelry-like assortments of pearls and beads. Within their unresolved ambivalence, Lou Masduraud’s handcrafted basement windows mark an opening, an invitation to succumb to transition – they serve as escape plans.
Niels Trannois’s work can be seen as fragments of fictional scenarios exploring what could happen if reality were to disappear, aiming to suspend an unresolved opposition between language and sensation, narration and abstraction, emotions and representation, between that which signifies and that which always eludes.
Works
escape plan (glitch 2), 2024
bronze, pearls, cristal, steel discs, jam nut, shell, iron wire, cotton wire
40 x 70 x 5cm
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escape plan (before midnight), 2024
bronze, pearl, iron wire
26 x 41 x 4cm
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General Strike, 2024
Watercolour, ink, oil & Letraset on paper
27.5 x 37.5cm
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Menace, 2024
Oil on laser engraved porcelain, mechanical pencil leads
36.5 x 25.5 cm
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The Sky is Thin as Paper here, 2022
print on fabric, oil, plexiglas, DMT capsule
122 x 88 x 10cm
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Reportagen aus der Schweiz (N. Meinberg), 2024
Watercolour, ink, oil & Letraset on paper
27.5 x 37.5cm
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Prototype (999 governing bodies), 2023
Paper, wood
51 x 37 x 20.5cm
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Speed Syndrome Society, 2018
bronze
7 x 7 x 7cm (each)
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Water Matter (Ecologist’s nightmare), 2024
Watercolour, ink, oil & Letraset on paper
27.5 x 37.5cm
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About the artists
Alan Schmalz (*1987 in Geneva, Switzerland) recent solo exhibitions include La Rose, Marseille (FR), Sentiment, Zürich (CH), Centre d’art Le LAIT, Albi (FR) and Truth and Consequences, Geneva (CH) as well as a joint exhibition together with Timothee Calame at Weiss Falk, Basel (CH). He has participated in numerous group exhibitions at Swiss Institute, New York (US), Clearing, Brussels (BE) and The Box, Los Angeles (US). Schmalz studied at Haute Ecole d’art et de design de Genève (HEAD) and currently lives and works in Marseille.
Lou Masduraud (*1990, Montpellier, France) lives and works in Geneva, Switzerland. In her work, Lou Masduraud analyses, modifies and stages collective and normative habits in such a way as to expose the relations of power and desire that underlie them. Borrowing from the grotesque, her formal language combines sculpture and installations to create phantasmagorical worlds alternative to dominant realities. She is interested in spaces that defy convention – spaces where the normal rules do not apply, or where these rules are pushed to the extreme. Thus, Lou Masduraud’s practice forms a continuum between the social ad private spheres through its evocation of both buildings and sculptures, and their exploration of the interplay between function and decoration. Lou Masduraud who has presented her work in monographic exhibitions such as at the Kunstraum Riehen (CH), MAMCO Geneva (CH), CAN - Centre d’art Neuchâtel (CH), La Maison Populaire Montreuil (FR), and in collective exhibitions such as Muzeum Susch (CH), Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (FR), Centre d’Art Contemporain de Genève (CH), Fondation d’Entreprise Ricard (FR), Kunsthaus Hamburg (DE), Kunsthalle Basel (CH), Moscow Biennal (RU). In 2023, she was awarded with the Manor Cultural Prize of Canton of Geneva.
Niels Trannois (*1976, France) lives and works in Lausanne, Switzerland and Marseille, France. Existing within the extended field of painting, the work of Niels Trannois can be understood as fragments of the fictional scenarios of what could happen if reality were to absent itself, the submerged side of a world in abeyance overrun by both figurative and symbolist resurgences. His artistic practice aims to suspend through a materiality of the sensible and irresolute opposition between language and sensation, narration and abstraction, emotions and representation, between that which signifies and that which, always, flees. Niels Trannois studied Fine Arts at the Villa Arson in Nice. His work has been shown at Villa du Parc in Annemasse (FR) where, together with Jessy Razafimandimby, they started their collaboration under the name of Quintana E. Amongst other venues, he has been showing at The Grotto - Quadrado Azul Gallery in Lisbon (PT), CACY in Yverdon (CH), Kunsthalle Basel (CH), Centre d’Art Contemporain in Geneva (CH), Supportico Lopez in Berlin (DE).