On the day on which the hairdressers do not cut their customers’ hair, the robotic lawnmower in the Ismaninger Schlosspark also refrains from shortening the blades of grass. “Monday is the day of rest”, is the motto for the automated lawnmower, which purrs around the meadow in front of the palace pavilion for the rest of the week: it repeatedly mows the signature of the artist Tornike Abuladze in Georgian letters into the lawn.
“That’s quite a gesture for an artist,” says Rasmus Kleine, the director of the Ismaninger Kallmann Museum, about this original Land Art signature, “and it’s also a bit brutal.” With the continuously moving robotic lawnmower, the artist appropriates nature, which he in turn does not allow to unfold again – except when the machine has to be charged for a short time or it is Monday.
Abuladze’s work, which of course also breathes a certain absurdity in the relationship between machine and nature, is part of a special group exhibition that can now be seen in the gallery in the palace pavilion: “Garden Work” brings together the works of six students from the Munich Art Academy, all of them from Peter Kogler’s class. The works that deal with gardens, nature and human gardening in a variety of ways – sculptures, works on paper, videos, actions and land art – were selected as part of a competition by the Munich Academy Association.
Kleine, director of the neighboring Kallmann Museum and first chairman of the academy association, had launched the project based on the question of how one could design an exhibition with young artists that should also relate to the location and the park. There were quite a few applications, and the group of six with the protagonists Abuladze, Julie de Kezel, Ludwig Dressler, Lionel Nymphius, Sebastian Quast and Julia Walk prevailed. Her works interact with both the historic palace pavilion and the surrounding garden landscape. Ironic, serious, critical, irritating.
“We wanted to play with this topic,” says Ludwig Dressler. His video installation “Garden Department” shows, on the one hand, a filmic recording of all the shelves of the garden department of a huge local hardware store, and on the other hand, a compilation of short video sequences in which exactly these countless products (grills, grill lighters, spades, garden chairs, umbrellas, robotic lawnmowers, etc.) are shown at the same time Youtube will be discussed and advertised.
There are 230 videos, summarized in a 15-minute film, created while zapping through YouTube. “I’ve been dealing with video culture for a long time,” says the 23-year-old Dressler, “I wanted to make a video that also shows the large number of availabilities.” As an observer of both films you are visually challenged on the one hand, and on the other hand you are in fact a little overwhelmed by the quantity of things that the beautiful new consumer world shows in its characteristic proliferation.
In contrast to this, in the entrance area of the gallery in the baroque pavilion, a quasi-romantic installation is set up that is quite suspicious of kitsch. Julie De Kezel has designed an oasis in the middle of the building using paper, light and a video. “It’s a fantasy landscape,” says the 25-year-old Belgian. “I’m playing with the borderline to kitsch here.”
Inspired by the baroque ambience of the place, which always has a certain decadence, as well as the winter gardens popular in the 19th century, the installation, enriched with many small details from nature, but also artificial fabrics, is an eye-catcher. Stripes hanging from the chandelier simulate trickling snow, there are crocuses, moss and marbles to be discovered on the white surface, in the middle of which a digital pond flashes. “Everything is very playful,” says de Kezel, who also works a lot with jewelry.
For young artists like you and your fellow students, it is a beautiful and rare opportunity to present yourself prominently. Kleine, who is primarily responsible for this and who rented the gallery in the pavilion from curator Gisela Hesse, is delighted: “We liked the fact that the works connect to living environments and are accessible.” Contemporary art does not always immediately arouse the warmest response and understanding. “It has an ease and a sense of humor,” he says.
In fact, the ceramic sculptures by the Swiss Sebastian Quast, which decorate the floor in a wing room, have a wink: They are the glazed rear parts of plastic garden ponds that seem to hide their heads in the parquet as if they were fleeing into other spheres. You are rooting in a listed ambience, as it were.
Julia Walk’s “Portrait of an Ismaning Woman” is also beautiful in the same room: in front of a black background and framed in gold, a woman’s face can be seen that looks like a baroque portrait, but on closer inspection is decorated with cabbage and cabbage leaves, of course Ismaning origins. The artist seems to be very fascinated by this part of the local history anyway: For the finissage, the exhibition ends on September 12, a summer garden party with collective cabbage cooking is planned. Walk offers courageous visitors their own head at one Face painting to transform into a cabbage head.
Lionel Nymphius’ work in the other wing room is not quite as humorous: his concrete blocks with artificial turf evoke associations with modern city silhouettes in their reduced appearance, in which green roofs bring nature into the urban wasteland. “A compensation for the desolation,” said Kleine.
Yes, the field of tension between nature and civilization, between artificiality, baroque and contemporary art is great, some things may be irritating for the conservative view. The local castle park is considered an English landscape garden, in which nature should develop more freely, as a demarcation to the French baroque garden with its strict, geometric shapes. Its historical designers could not have imagined that a robotic lawnmower would turn its artistic circles here on a large meadow.
The exhibition “Working in the garden – the art academy as guests in the palace pavilion” lasts until September 12th. Open Tuesday to Saturday 2pm to 5pm and Sunday 1pm to 5pm.