1_ HAPPINESS IS A WARM GUN - Art Prospects in Liverpool and Cologne

Artists of different generations from Liverpool and Cologne and a documentary about the project, Eight Days A Week 'in an exhibition
Happiness is a warm gun, the Beatles sang on their legendary white album. And artists are not always in search of happiness? For the Liverpool painter, poet and performance artist Adrian Henri (1932-2000) and the Cologne painter, sculptor, and writer Michael Buthe Collageur (1944-1994) this is true for sure. Both are inseparable from generations in the art with the revolt against the narrowness of the social relations and to the spirit of utopia was. And with it the desire for freedom and personal pursuit of happiness. Both stand for an artistic approach, in which the tendency to break, from the pre-social life-forms, and the collapse of confidence in creative originality in a fascinating way. Rebellion on the one hand, poetry on the other side. Liverpool's Henri sat not only as a painter in a world of Dada and Pop Art Accents. As a poet, performance artist and singer of the legendary band "The Liverpool Scene", he showed how a critical view of society and aesthetic pleasure, melancholy and joy are clever to bring in a creative balance. Likewise, the decades of living in Cologne Buthe was a master at balancing the dramatic and harmonic elements of life. With its powerful, revitalizing color turmoil he knew the social spirit of the postwar German Heavy shake up. And he put his happenings, like its written tale of sober reality of everyday life against the dimension of the outbreak and the Dreamy. Both artists, Henri Buthe and developed their art in a time in which the cities in which they lived, Liverpool and Cologne were, for a short time to the creative center of the world.
But how is this creative spirit of the late 1960s and 1970s, has developed in the following years? Which individualism and social trends in both cities mark the work of contemporary artists since then? And there are even trends in the artistic work in Liverpool and Cologne? And there are trends in the creative work of artists of different generations? Henri and Buthe are the focus of an exhibition in which artists from different generations from Liverpool and Cologne different perspectives on art and life in the last decades to express. So shall the issue in times of so-called globalization show similarities and differences. And it aims to visualize how individual artistic approaches in their personal and social experiences are intertwined. On display are works by the Liverpudlian artist Adrian Henri, Bernadette O'Toole, Frances display, Ailie Rutherford, and Nicki Mc'Cubbing. From the Cologne art scene Michael Buthe, Martina Karbe, Sandra Zarth and Sarah Hildebrand are represented with works of art. The nine artists can not represent the whole spectrum of art in both cities over the course of fifty years. But you can certainly make a clear development direction.

Was there in the 1970s, despite the great diversity of artistic styles another emanating from Pop Art and (abstract) expressionism common thrust of modern art, which was aimed at the center of one tend to be conservative-oriented society, the diverse range of artistic activities in the postmodernism without a common societal orientation. Anything is possible, there is no clear reference point more.
Even the question of why of art works has evaporated in the air escaping gas. The art is in Liverpool and Cologne since determined reinforced by individual search movements and personal mythologies. This can, as in the painting by Martina Karbe emanating from human bodies, their own desires and their own fear and follow connect the everyday language with the language of dreams. But you can also immerse themselves in the mystery of abstract structures that overlap in the general law and the custom law - as in the paintings by Bernadette O'Toole. Based on the magic line, architectural and poetic dimension. You can about the subject of youth explore the tension between social traditions and contemporary developments and thematize psychological constants of human experience and cultural differences - as in the complex figural scenes of Frances dislay. You can also perform well-known objects of our imagination in the gap between familiarity and strangeness - like Nicki Mc'Cubbing and Sandra Zarth with their sculptures. And it can show how the works of Ailie Rutherford and Sarah Hildebrand, that the drawing in the 21st and Century is still the most basic human expression. In the drawings coincide the forces of the unconscious and the power of the artistic intention on most personal way, if it succeeds artists, break the bonds of artistic cleverness Gekonntheit and routine and completely follow their vibrations. With this radical commitment to artistic originality closes the circle of the younger generation of artists from Liverpool and Cologne to the older generation of Adrian Henri and Michael Buthe. And as for fortune, it seems that at least since the second half of the 20th Century all (Artist) generations develop different idea. Only that it plays a role in the artistic process, seems to be beyond question.
Cultural work of BBK Cologne e.V.
Frankenwerft 35/Stapelhaus, 50667 Cologne, Tel: 0221-2582113
28th September to 21 October 2012,
Opening: 28.9, 20 clock.
Open: Mon-Fri 10-13,14-17 clock, Tue 10-13, 14-19 clock