Antje Wachs Gallery is pleased to exhibit new works by the young painter Kerstin Pfefferkorn in Berlin for the first time. At the same time we are presenting the new video “Moustache” by Lithuanian video artist Arunas Gudaitis in the project room. Kerstin Pfefferkorn deals in her works with only one subject: the human character. On the uncommonly small sized wooden plates the mostly cut-out like figures nearly fill the whole image area and leave little space for the afterimage.

The artist wants to focus the attention of the viewer completely to the pictured human body – firstly to his „architectural structure“ and even more to the expression, the mood, the mental state.
Source of her paintings are most of the time photographies out of old books: a children’s book about physical education, a medical guidebook or a portrait book from the 1930s. In her paintings Pfefferkorn investigates the propaganda icons of the 1920s in Russia, during WW II and especially that ones of her youth in the GDR. The artist is searching retrospectivally in these images of the past moments of irritation and uncertainty. „Where is threat behind the innocence; where human attitude in the pose?“ She deconstructs the persons, that have turned into an object, and their posture of the head, their „blue glance in a wide, shining future“, she deprives them of their original context to rather transfer them into the silent atmosphere of her delicate, translucent paintings.
Without preparatory drawing, starting from any detail, Kerstin Pfefferkorn’s representations arise on the grounded chipboard. By differentiated confined colored areas, reduced to the substance and economical in details, she adds transparently layer onto layer and gives her motives at the same time volume and depth of the image. The light palette of the eggtempera colors is highly reduced. Pfefferkorn takes her time while painting, on and on she reworks particular parts with water, to expand into the image carrier sometimes, until the wooden structure becomes visible again, or she emphasizes other parts by more intensive colors. The limy, disguised texture of the works reminds one of wall paintings, in the same way as the manner of the construction of the chipboard on the wooden plate seems like a fresco mounted on wood, detached from the wall. Her sources of inspiration emerge clearly: besides Marlene Dumas and Edward Hopper especially the works of Giotto and Piero della Francesca impressed the artist deeply during a trip in Italy that she did with her HGB painting class from Leipzig – after her studies under Arno Rink she is now master student of Neo Rauch since autumn 2006.
Pfefferkorns paintings win over by the aura of calmness and pausing. Suddenly the figures that came out of the past turn back into a melancholic glance and the elusive light colors become to a symbol of caducity.

For the video „Moustache“ Arunas Gudaitis (*1973) has grown himself a beard. This has been his first attempt to grow it. He wanted to learn how a man changes after growing a moustache.
Does a moustache make you a different person in any way?
Referring to the principal of dialogue construction used in film industry, he decided to talk to himself, and the subject of the conversation is a moustache. There is an illusion of a dialogue, when, in reality, it’s only a monologue. Traditional dialogue is ruined. This is a shifted-in-time, improvised monologue with an imaginary interlocutor without any expectations of answers to questions. Both interlocutors try to defend their positions – of growing and not growing a moustache.