Weitzmann + Muehle

The Phatory LLC is pleased to present the first New York exhibition of German artists Stefan Muehle and Carsten Weitzmann in collaboration with the Potsdam City Gallery under the direction of Erik Bruinenberg. The exhibition opens on November 12 and runs through December 4. An opening reception will be held November 12, from 7 - 9:00 p.m.

Weitzmann and Muehle were both born in East Germany in the early 1960s at the peak of the Cold War and the problematic historical circumstances of their early years haunts the work of each. Smart, observant, concerned yet holding something back emotionally, their work explores the texture of an everyday world, exemplified by found images, that is never perhaps quite what it seems. The work of an early generation of German artists who had to grapple with the immediate aftermath of the Second World War has become well known in the United States. This exhibit provides an intriguing glimpse of a subsequent generation of artists who had to grapple with their own historical dilemmas, though often on a more personal and intimate scale. The works of Weitzmann and Muehle are quite different in their constriction and effects but contain deep similarities that make their juxtaposition in this exhibit particularly illuminating.

Muehle often places his found images against patterns and textures associated with the texture of life in post-War Berlin. The juxtapositions elicit memories and fantasies of specific places without allowing the viewer to precisely identify those places. This same ambiguous historical no man's land is found in Weitzmann's images taken from mass media and pornographic sources. Radically cropping and manipulating these images, the artist shows us basic aspects of his, and our own, cultural landscape while keeping us at a vaguely disconcerting distance from it. The question of finding place play an important role in the work of both artists but both are attuned by history and the emergence of a world dominated by mass media images to have a questioning attitude towards the very notion of place.