PRESS RELEASE
JB Jurve is pleased to announce Matthias Lahme auf wiedersehen, the artist’s first solo exhibition in the United States. The show will be on view from February 12, 2011 through March 28, 2011.
Matthias Lahme (b. 1974 Marsberg, Germany) is well-known for his contribution to the hobbypopMUSEUM along with fellow Düsseldorf colleagues Sophie von Hellermann, Christian Jendreiko, André Niebur, Marie-Céline Schäfer and Dietmar Lutz. In his solo exhibitions, his striking paintings are often characterized by a moment of dissolution - a suspension of the point where form dissolves into the invisible.
In his Installation at JB Jurve, Matthias Lahme will present the micro sculpture auf wiedersehen. On a pedestal in the middle of the space, the viewer will find a petry dish that contains the piece, real and invisible, the result of the futuristic, technological processing of a sculpture. Matthias Lahme created it with his own hands from self-hardening modelling material and sent it on its travels to Nanoscribe GmbH, in Eggenstein-Leopoldshafen. A scientist at Nanoscribe accepted the poetic work and duly transformed it into a particle of hardened photoresist, smaller than a speck of dust.
Its microscopic size notwithstanding, the particle has a shape. Authenticated by means of a photograph taken by an electron microscope, the viewer sees it as an illustration. A postcard shows the microsculpture auf wiedersehen and duly imparts information about its seemingly absurd dimensions of one thousandth of a millimetre; in this way, that casual look into the little bottle suddenly takes on a different meaning. Knowing what “it” looks like, the process behind the work and the results are brought to mind, and therefore also Lahme’s treatment of the sculptural idea and material.
A set of word paintings in black ink, in which Lahme isolates everyday phrases from their usual content in an inverse painting process on heavy cotton watercolor paper, will be on the wall opposite the sculpture.
Next to the word paintings will be a set of three ink and cut-out paintings from a series titled Lashes.
JB Jurve is also pleased to announce the U.S. presentation of the book coming soon:, a 52 page survey of the artists’s production form the years 2004 through 2010, published by the artist and Katharina Fritsch.
