Lina Bebi @ Hellenic Culture Foundation of Berlin

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Τhe opening of the exhibition “Matter touches shadow” took place on Tuesday 12 March at the Hellenic Culture Foundation in Berlin.

When the Doric “piety” of Ingbert Brunk’s austere marble forms meets the metaphysical “transparency” of Lina Bebi’s illusory worlds, the union of the opposites leads to a dialectical relationship and to the abolition of boundaries between painting and sculpture. It is a meeting where both fictional and real spaces exist not only in one but in between multiple temporalities. By using contrasting materials, paper and marble, the two artists create potential landscapes, where the “visible” and “invisible” coexist ideally and where the dimension of time oscillates between the sensation of a dream or a nightmare, between the past or the future.

In her drawings and three-dimensional installations Lina Bebi captures moments in time. She deals with time as if it were eternal. The delicate structures, the persistence in the art of handicraft, in memory and the imaginary, the forms that recall both ancient figurines and children’s toys, explore the boundaries between the familiar and the unfamiliar, the collective unconscious and personal memory, the fragile and the solid. Although the narrative is absent from her dreamlike spaces they seem to have their own historical memory, their own feelings of sadness, despair or loneliness, though without reaching an ultimate metaphysical nihilism. Lina Bebi meditatively sketches the patina of time and silence evolves into a trace.

In Ingbert Brunk’s work too, fragments of memory transform themselves into sculptural entities and the ephemeral acquires a trace and a suppleness. The artist does not copy nature; he reinvents it anew through matter. He draws his inspiration from the natural world and he constructs, with calculated mathematical precision, geometric structures out of the Naxos marble. It is there that he traces back to look for the essential and the timeless, the whole and the fundamental. The decisiveness of his gesture increases the tension between stability and instability, the concrete and the abstract, the solid and the fragile. According to the logic of modernism and of the great sculptors of the 20th century Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth, the parts of the whole become a metaphor of the landscape.

The works of both Lina Bebi and Ingbert Brunk are communication networks, callings and demons of a three- dimensional life, memories of the past or desires that come from the realm of the future. “The only reality in life is that of the moment”, writes Gaston Bachelard in his study ‘L’Intuition de l’instant;’.’ “It takes the recollection of many moments to make up a full memory”.

Duration of the exhibition: 13 March – 18 April 2013
Openings hours: Monday – Friday 10:00 – 16:00