Immaterial | THK Cologne Group Show | 2021

THK Gallery is proud to announce Immaterial, our new show at THK Cologne.

 

Featuring Jan Scharrelmann, Patrick Bongoy, Pardon Mapondera, and Johno Mellish.

Immaterial brings into conversation four artists who interrogate the surface of our constructed realities. With a focus on materiality, they invert expectations and invalidate assumptions. They probe, test, and question; engaging in a dance of opposites to expose the elasticity of meanings.

Materials have complex associations. They function as a signifier of the past, and from this negotiated present, speak to a contingent future. With the slippage in meaning the centre cannot hold.

What is, what was, what still might be: reimagined, Immaterial.

Jan Scharrelmann's works engage with the transience of their materiality in the wider phenomena of astrophysics, simultaneously drawing on references as varied as Science Fiction and contemporary music and culture. His voluminous creations with their iridescent surfaces take a variety of forms — from the monolithic to the polygonal — and through their complex construction, challenge their own materiality. Suggesting flux and movement, his variegated colours are a metaphor for the changing states of aggregation— from foggy fumes to dull compounds to shiny metallic liquids.

 

As if a challenge to gravity itself, this Cologne-based sculptor mobilises the signalling effect of colour in an alchemic-like process, drawing the viewer deep into his luminescent interior voids. In a play of opposites, his sculptures embody dichotomies: both light and heavy, hollow and condensed, shapeshifting on the continuum between order and chaos. 

The textured surface of Patrick Bongoy's works are the result of a painstaking process of cutting and weaving together strips of hessian and rubber. This complex technique, carefully layered in a three-dimensional relief,  reference the physical labour still present in day to day living in the DRC. Bongoy’s works reference colonial legacies and power structures that still exist today. 

Pardon Mapondera's material of choice is found materials. Through this spectrum of unpredictable paraphernalia of materials he is able to collect, contend, and curate already existing histories, stories, continuing politics embedded in this debris of a consumerist culture. He is fascinated by the flexibility of some materials, how for instance heat transforms plastic into a metaphor for contorted and traumatised bodies. At this point the materials carry their own stories and philosophy.

Johno Mellish constructs his photographic mise-en-scènes by combining history, memory and imagination. Sourcing imagery from both traditional media channels and vernacular photographs, he composes fictional narratives which mirror our post-truth, fragmented, and data-driven society.