22 June 2005
Reflections on Exhibiting at a Bank
As Alexandra told today about exhibiting in Libraries I remembered our weirdest experience of showing our work in a Bank in Berlin. It was a Bank called Norisbank, where showed Gert Folmering, Tom Schnick and me in 2002 under the title "Kalte Krieger"- "Cold Warriors". We didnt knew the space well, I had been in Georgia, and collected 25 most recent works three days before the opening and took the plane to Berlin. My mood was dark since my mother died two month before also in Berlin. I did not have big expectations on selling, but anyway it was a chance, in the center of Berlin, in a Bank and we wanted to see our work together, since our last "groupshow" was back in 1997. I think it became a real failure. Just see this photo, the paintings had to be hanged on ropes, as they didn't want to have holes in their walls:
Paintings: Hans Heiner Buhr Birdpainting: Gert Folmering
It shows the office of the chairman of this local branch. He agreed to give his wall to a number of my smaller paintings, without knowing them. So when I hanged them up, his face was still friendly, but I could see, that he had something softer expected. But these are the small paintings. We filled his whole medium sized bank, wich was perfectly clean before, with our huge ruff canvases of dying soldiers, cossacks, drunken communists, suiciding Mayakovsky's and a Postmodern Jesus with its glory and a laptop on his knees right in the entrance hall. To the opening came very few bank stuff, but all our friends, wich were enyojing to change this place of banksecrets and transactions into a sort of Post-Punk -Pub.
When I walked around, I thought business would go very bad for the next 2 weeks maybe, because the art was to heavy and even frightening potential customers. It was a real contradiction, our art beating the moneybusiness and this conservative banker types and their jaunty secretaries not to know how to handle that stuff seeing every day on work.
Tom sold two small paintings, Gert and me not any. We had a opening with our bunch of friends, but almost nobody from the Banking world. From the show itself we had no further feedback, exept the relieved faces of the team there. This was our first and last show in a Bank. Here are some other paintings we showed there:
Tom Schnick, Der Schrei, 180x130 cm
Gert Folmering, Lula, 60x45cm
Hans Heiner Buhr, Herbstbild Familie, 160x128 cm
Labels: Neue Kunst
¶ 11:50 PM
Comments:
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sounds like quite an experience. I'm amazed that they actually let you keep the work up and didn't ask you to take it done.
Thanks for sharing.
Thanks for sharing.
I love to scare conservative people with radical art and electronic noise music.
This reminds me of my avant garde music ensemble's first concert in New York City. It was to be at the Brooklyn Armory.
We arrived two weeks early, having mixed up the dates.
An armed security guard escorted us off the premises, as we performed a "walking concert" of playing battery powered synthesizers and singing stupidly and laughing.
At the actual show, I was running all the electronic noise machines far off in a corner of the stage where no one could see me, as singer was up front singing to music coming from nowhere.
Wonderful concert. A pretty lesbian girl I fell in love with decided to become a musician due to seeing us.
1983 I think it was.
Camouflage Danse was the band, and Bennett Theissen was the vocalist and songwriter.
We still have CDs and DVDs of our band.
Keep making art that banks frown upon.
LOL
:^)
This reminds me of my avant garde music ensemble's first concert in New York City. It was to be at the Brooklyn Armory.
We arrived two weeks early, having mixed up the dates.
An armed security guard escorted us off the premises, as we performed a "walking concert" of playing battery powered synthesizers and singing stupidly and laughing.
At the actual show, I was running all the electronic noise machines far off in a corner of the stage where no one could see me, as singer was up front singing to music coming from nowhere.
Wonderful concert. A pretty lesbian girl I fell in love with decided to become a musician due to seeing us.
1983 I think it was.
Camouflage Danse was the band, and Bennett Theissen was the vocalist and songwriter.
We still have CDs and DVDs of our band.
Keep making art that banks frown upon.
LOL
:^)
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