Galerie Karin Guenther is pleased to host the first solo exhibition of the conceptual artist David Lieske, who was born in Hamburg in 1979. After tenures in Tel Aviv and New York, Lieske now lives and works in Paris and Berlin. He is a co-initiator of a wide variety of collaborations, all of which he sees as part of his artistic practice. For example, he is the co-founder of the Hamburg based label for electronic music Dial, the Mathew Galerie (Berlin/ New York) and the fashion magazine 299 792 458 M/S, as well as the tennis fashion label DL Courtwear.
Lieske uses a wide variety of artisanal and applied practices in his work, switching from producer to reviewer and repeatedly linking these levels with fragments of his own biography. None of his works can be viewed in isolation, but are systematically linked to his oeuvre as a whole in a variety of directions. His idiosyncratic exhibition- practice, which formulates itself in expansive installations, sculptural arrangements, textual and photographic works, repeatedly shows references to a diverse system of references. These can range from pop cultural to art historical sources, to references on critical theory, fashion, architecture, film and archaeology. Lieske repeatedly alludes to the procedures and aesthetics of historical conceptual art and institutional critique, which he expands and updates by adding a biographical layer. Starting from this, Lieske acts from production to production on the close and tense relationship between artist and work.
The title of the current exhibition “Dritte Ausstellung Für Photographische Arbeiten” (Third Exhibition of Photographic Works) refers to the first ever exhibition of photographic works in Hamburg, which was presented in 1868 in a specially designed temporary wooden architecture. This was preceded by presentations of this then completely new medium in Vienna (1864), and Berlin (1865). Lieske’s exhibition consists of 14 photographic reproductions as hand-retouched darkroom prints using the silver gelatine process on baryte paper, framed in a passepartout and presented hanging on the wall. The reproduced motifs are partly taken from various exhibition contexts of Lieske’s artistic practice of the last 20 years or are based on originals from his archive.
Here follows a short statement by the artist:
“The starting point for my exhibition had to be Hamburg, the place where I had decided to become an artist myself after studying Michael Krebber’s artist’s book “Apothekerman” (2001). Now in 2022 I hadn’t done anything for a long time, but secretly dreamed of allowing myself something like a photography exhibition.
In other words, a purely pictorial exhibition as a repetitive setting of my previous exhibitions in the Duchampian sense “en miniature”, which I hope will charge itself with meaning on its own, so to speak. I had to think of Krebber’s exhibition “Miami City Ballet” and how he had managed at that time to finally tilt the relationship between exhibition and press text for good. A special text of his, whose conclusion, the statement: “The fact that I call myself an artist here is enough”, still resonates with me today. (In this exhibition, too, I hope)”
On the occasion of the exhibition "Dritte Ausstellung fuer Photographische Arbeiten" by David Lieske, a publication designed by Atelier Maève is published by Bierke Books. In addition to the documentation of the exhibition , it contains an artist talk with Nicholas Tammens.