Since the early 1990s Pedro Cabrita Reis' work has revolved around themes of dwelling, construction and territory. In addition to works which are based on everyday found objects, such as doors or windows, he repeatedly develops extensive installations that take possession of spaces and places with overwhelming structures. Cabrita Reis' work achieves an atmosphere of emptiness, loneliness and stillness. The stoically thoughtful character of his pieces alludes to the homelessness of man as the basic constant of the human condition and is thus one of the most important guiding themes of his work. The doors are nailed shut, the windows have no view, found tires can no longer roll. Cabrita Reis addresses space and time by considering existential issues of self and cultural memory: "For me, an artwork is a produced reality that focuses the experience of reality as insight", he asserts.
Together with Cabrita Reis' work, we show Nan Goldin's "Irish Landscapes", which were created during her visit to Ireland in 1979 and 2002 and premiered in her first museum exhibition in the Irish Musuem of Modern Art in Dubline last year. While Goldin has become famous for her intense portraits of her friends and lovers since the 1970s, the "Irish Landscapes" show unexpected and almost everyday - rocky landscapes and moving seas from the Donegal, Galway and Dublin areas that are (almost) deserted. Similar to her portraits, the images have the aesthetic of a snapshot, with a very specific sense of colour and light. They are deeply emotionally charged, raw and moving, capturing the lucid moment of their emergence with poignant force.
The sole "figurative" work by Goldin in the exhibition "Dream Grid" (2014), belongs in the broadest sense to the body of work "Scopophilia", on which she has been working since 2010. Like in a frieze, she places together in a picture grid, details of baroque still lifes and nudes from the Louvre, such as "The Rape of Proserpina" (1570) above a sequence of nude portraits of one of her lovers.
The works of the sculptor Justin Matherly shown in the exhibition refer to the philosophy and sculpture of antiquity. His extremely contemporary interpretations of ancient sculpture, such as those of the Greek god of medicine, Asclepius, and his son Telesphorus made from concrete, gypsum and plastic are broken, scratched, porous, and smeared with paint. They rely on medical walking aids that serve as both pedestals and reinforce the impression of fragility in their construction. They appear however to stand in stark contrast to their marble ancestors, they are able to revive their morals and minds with the greatest perseverance and modesty, precisely because of their weaknesses and inadequacies.
