17.10.-27.11.04

Clare Goodwin and Reto Leibundgut designed the rooms together, even if not in form of a direct collaboration. Both are mostly engaged in their works to the reutilisation of discovered material. While Goodwin processes pictorially images from magazines or found photos, Leibundgut works with waste materials (mostly wood, leather or plastic), which turn in a complex manufacturing process into profound installations/objects. The works fit together admirably, because both have clearly as fund the formal language of the 60ies and 70ies. An exciting comparison of two, in fact totally different, positions.

Clare Goodwin has called attention constantly in the last years to herself. Whether painting, installations, text works or performances – she feels at home in all sections. For the actual exhibition she shows exclusively painting, even if partly hanged as an installation. In old furniture catalogs or magazines, she searches the motives she is interested in. Mostly there are interiors, which she knows from her teens. From the technique masterly realised, she amazes with spatial illusions. Wallpaper samples are conferred meticulously; the scenery oscillates between opulent Pop Art and reduced colour panel painting. She also reprocesses photos, which she found in thrift shops, and frames persons or objects with coloured lines. These new works allow her bringing room interiors and processed photos in to a direct dialog, in an installative context.

Leibundgut shows four works of different working. For his three large-sized shingle pictures he cut out shingles from plastic culls and put them like fish scales on huge timber panels. You feel reminded of degenerate farmhouse walls – if there was not the dazzling play of colours of plastic cuts. Properly the artist has produced «pictorially» colour gradients, which attract and fascinate. A ship, produced from old leather sofas, lies in an exhibition room, ready to sail; or did it just ground? Simultaneously the boat reminds of chair cushion of the 70ies and the anxious question rests, if you can take a seat or not. Leibundguts wood inlays already created a furore in many places. Also in the exhibition, they adopt an important position and complete the other works admirably. As a last work, he cut out ambiguous house slogans and biblical quotations from plastic buckets and installed above several doors. «Be blessed your entries and your exits» – welcome in!

Bernhard Bischoff, October 2004