The Golden Punch

In November 2018, the exhibition The Golden Punch took place in a private apartment in the Sachsenhausen district of Frankfurt am Main. The 5-day show presented contemporary artworks by 11 artists from Germany. Living rooms and bedrooms became a temporary gallery as well as the bathroom and the hallway. In the intimate atmosphere of the private sphere, surrounded by everyday objects that recall the original purpose of the place, room for room, drawings, abstract and figurative works entered into a dialogue with video works and installations. The site-specific theme of an exhibition of apartments and its relevance in 2018 were as much in the foreground as the individual artist positions selected by the curatorial collective KVTV. Questions about one's own identity and sexuality in the media age, the perception of the human body and the idea of comfort, the humorous handling of reality as well as the continuation of the concept of painting in the 21st century occupied the exhibited artists.

In the entrance area of the apartment La Nuit Espagnole by the artist Giulietta Ockenfuß and Better Living Subdivision (BALITA), a digital painting by Nicholas Grafia, were shown. The watercolour painted by Ockenfuß in 2018 refers to the work of the same name by Francis Picabia from 1922, which inspired the painter and former owner of La Nuit Espagnole, William Copley, to take up the motif in his own painting as early as 1972. While in Picabia and Copley man and woman, black and white, determine the motif and form of the pictures, Ockenfuß opens up the right half of the picture and creates close-ups of the shadowy figures, which tell independent stories away from the interaction.

The exhibited works by Nicholas Grafia comprise a total of three digital paintings, which in their Forms of presentation vary. Painted in garish colours, these were first created on a pad and were printed afterwards either on PVC building material tarpaulin or on a wooden plate with acrylic paint transferred. Better Living Subdivision (BALITA) shows a suspected male torso, in a body-hugging swimming trunks, standing in front of a pool with sea snake. In this work Grafia throws a critical look at masculinity and unmasks our still common clichés of masculinity in the 21st century.

In the passageway room, Mikolaj Sobczak's overdrawn representations meet Carla Luisa Reuter's sometimes sketchily hinted at illustrations. In his three watercolour drawings - Walking Lesson, Witch Trial and Perfume Exorcism - Mikolaj Sobczak shows detail shots of bizarre scenes that take place in a courtroom. Figures with occasional grotesque faces and bodies as if overlong, sharp fingernails and a duck's head meet. In Stalker (Summer), Carla Luisa Reuter experiments with the most diverse materials such as chalk, oil paints and acrylic on canvas. In her work, the artist shows in a stage-like structure a male and female figure, which are found in different scenes. With his work Freiheit liegt nicht auf der Straße (2018) Moritz Grimm pursues the question of the functionality and purpose of objects. The work appears to be a normal birdcage, but this has been left open at both the top and bottom and can no longer fulfil its actual purpose - preventing birds from flying freely.

In the series Dissolved By Light Deborah Nerlich addresses the subject of the durability and lifespan of painting. The artist experiments with painting techniques that create images whose reception remains temporary for the viewer or owner. The strokes that glow violet on the canvas are applied with the help of matrice paper that originates from the tattooing field and have an effect of indefinite duration. As the title already announces in the past tense, the colour will dissolve through the incidence of light. After this reaction, only traces of graphite remain on the untreated canvas, which served as a sketch for overpainting the violet strokes.

The Tiffany glass work of the collective Die Römischen Votzen, however, certainly leaves its mark. The drawings engraved into the glass and subsequently coloured with ink show, as the title of the work, Sauna, visible in the picture, announces, a female "gang" in the sauna. Here the "cunt", the female sex, is in the foreground. This is repeatedly presented to the viewer in a self-confident and active role. Sauning with broad legs, peeing in the shower area or sitting on the head of a tied up person and at the same time singing according to the artistic practice of the collective.

The drawing Girls From out of World by Moritz Grimm, which is reflected in the mirror pieces of the Tiffany glass work Sauna, is also dedicated to the uncanny but also exciting activities of a female group. In a sexual revenge mission, alien amazons take out on the local inhabitants. While one man is already impaled on a pole, another is being attacked. Despite his fear he seems to feel a certain lust for the execution, at least his sex facing the sky indicates this to the viewer.

The video work Is a whip nessecary by Theresa Weisheit takes the viewer on a meditation on the question of control and loss of control. The horse and the whip referred to in the title are representative of the stimulating ego, which in the second part of the video wants to climb a slippery slope. In a synthesis, the searching individual finally finds a reconciling moment in Water.

The bathroom is owned by two artists - Anna Hofmann. and Ksenija Jovišević. Ksenija Jovišević shows the work entitled Tourist Romantic (Nuit de Folie), a shower curtain, which is presented here according to its actual function. The motif, a romantic sunset on the beach surrounded by palm trees, evokes certain thoughts and a mood in the viewer, which should be associated with the clichéd image of "paradise". In a wall cupboard opposite, Anna Hofmann positions her small clay sculptures next to toilet rolls, which refer to a human existence in the apartment. The artist shapes everyday objects such as cigarettes and chocolate, cigarette packets or pills, which the viewer knows from daily use. The Followers, painted with paint and boat varnish, as the sculptures are called, frame the illustration - Grande Probleme, which is on the back wall of the cabinet.

In the last room of the exhibition, the bedroom, there is another work by Ksenija Jovišević MONT Painting No6. A down jacket stretched on a wooden frame, presented here over a bed - which has a similar structure in the framing. The artist examines the status symbol of MONT jackets, which were very popular in Serbia in the 1990s and are now returning to popular culture. In her two works Tourist Romantic (Nuit de Folie) and MONT Painting No6 the artist explores the question of a contemporary concept of painting.

"From the flight of a hotel corridor two people approach the viewer, looking around, groping. Uncertain about their names, her decision is clear: in the standardized comfort of the suite, they must surrender to the risks of reflection and symbolic play. 48 hours"

is a quote from Catherina Cramer's video Sane & Sanitized. The partly eerie, partly humorous scenes of the 14-minute video remain mysterious and playful. The viewer is captivated by the aesthetic and bizarre ideas and dramaturgy of the protagonists' play.

Curated by KVTV, the exhibition was supported by Kulturamt Frankfurt a.M.