Abbas Ebensperger Project #2: Christian Egger. This Is This! (C´mon!) Ich für Ichs (C´mon!) These Things Too! (C´mon, C´mon!, C´mon!!! ...

01.04.2011 - 23.04.2011

Galerie Abbas-Ebensperger, Berlin / Deutschland, Wien / Österreich
Galerie Patrick Ebensperger, Berlin, Berlin / Deutschland

To my teenage entrepreneurs eyes and ears – tuned to crushing tightness of Ferdinand Kriwet and Supermax – it was the most laughably amateurish and weird thing I had ever seen or heard. Meandering and self-indulgent, ambigiously titled works like “The Coming of How (new improved) ” ,“oh up against the w(all yours) ” and "Make my pseudo - imperative, entertainment!“, were not even close to my definition of contemporary intellectual fashion. And despite "This Is This!( C´mon!) Ich für Ichs ( C´mon!) These Things Too ( C´mon, C´mon! C´mon!`s considerable aesthetic chops, this exhibition even managed to make blistering glas sculptures look kooky and off-kilter.... It was an acquired taste with many restrictions in terms of material usage, to be sure, and it took more than a dozen closer looks – no, I don’t know why I kept at it – to get the sense of cohesion…This Is This!( C´mon!) Ich für Ichs ( C´mon!) These Things Too ( C´mon, C´mon! C´mon!....was about. This complex experience, that seemed very game-like in its construction, wasn’t about the wholeness of minimalist form, with all its grandiosity and epic sense of projection; this exhibition was about psychedelic introspection, about getting incredibly high and letting all of your demons and mystic bullshit flow out on a river of meandering visual shred via a clear and abstract formal language. At the same time the world …This Is This!( C´mon!) Ich für Ichs ( C´mon!) These Things Too ( C´mon, C´mon! C´mon!...constructed was coherent and gloriously imaginative, sometimes beautiful and often horrifying. It was an exhibition which has long struggled with and finally had found its space.

Indeed , a supplement of boredom was the price the viewer was asked to pay , as a kind of devotion of art as such, to the reappearence of a virtual religion of the image on the other side of contradictory marginality ( and in another sense, no doubt, the spectator was inscribed in this exhibition allegorically in the person of the mute and quick-witted companion-servant of the artist):" This Is This!( C´mon!) Ich für Ichs ( C´mon!) These Things Too ( C´mon, C´mon! C´mon! was like a moon on a lake. Only there was no moon and no lake. Only This Is This!( C´mon!) Ich für Ichs ( C´mon!) These Things Too ( C´mon, C´mon! C´mon!......"

[Text: Christian Egger]