Almine Rech Shanghai is pleased to announce you in the space; the space in you, Matthias Bitzer’s sixth solo exhibition with the gallery and his first exhibition in China.  

The works in you in the space; the space in you evince a turn inwards—a subtle contemplation of how time, memory, and perception can be captured as a complex, rela- tional space. Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli argues that there is nothing intrinsic about the flowing of time, describing its movements instead as “a blurred reflection of a mysterious improbability of the universe at a point in the past.” The secret of time, Rovelli claims, “lies in this slippage that we feel on our pulse, viscerally, in the enigma of memory, in anxiety about the future.” Drawing upon memory, the visual legacy of modernist abstraction, her- metic allusions to literature, and personal symbology, the recent works of German artist Matthias Bitzer echo Rovelli’s assertion that “what we call time is a complex collection of structures, of layers.” 

The exhibition’s title work depicts two abstracted line figures whose limbs delicately overlap atop a light blue ground. The dramatically reduced composition calls attention towards the myriad ways in which our worlds touch one another, yet nonetheless maintain an insistent insularity. In a suite of paintings entitled les Parques, a trio of elegant some- what androgynous figures clothed in geometric garments recalling the abstract textiles of Sonia Delaunay impassively gaze at the viewer. Named after the three fates, these figures seem at once familiar and foreign, contemporary and historic, iconic and unknown. Rather than bring the viewer closer to them, the intimacy and directness of their gaze seems to emphasize the distance between the beholder and that which they are beholding: an intensely personal space between.  

Bitzer is emphatic that the meanings of his works are not fixed, but instead emerge through the experience of their observers in time and space. His work possesses a kind of openness born of interstitial spaces: the gaps between abstraction and figuration, painting and sculpture, the historic and the contemporary—and between one moment, one impression, one sensation and another. Working in thin layers of acrylic paint, the immediate effect of Bitzer’s canvases is flat, rigorous, and precise. Yet only a few moments with them reveals a world of submerged forms or extensions into space that seem to flicker upon the surface of the image.  

In the painting trésor a spectral face looms behind a precise grid of colorful squares. Lurking behind these shapes, a hazy visage extends to the edges of the composition. En- tangled in a visual tug of war with the geometric layer of the painting, the figure is never fully legible to us, but rather seems to inhabit the image—perhaps even to haunt it. The cropping of the figure (we only see the traces of a disembodied face) imparts a sense of immediacy, of closeness, that is confounded by the insistent duality of the image: the geometric surface that obscures her and holds her at a distance. The painting hinges open to reveal its recto by means of a mirror integrated into a custom frame. Here too, what we see is contingent and depends on many factors: the conditions of the room, the gravity of the object, and the movement of the exhibitions’ visitors in space, which can push the  “door” shut through the displacement of air.

Viewing therefore is never a stable experience in Bitzer’s universe, but always some-  thing partial, something chimerical, something in a state of becoming. 

- Jesi Khadivi, Berlin-based curator and writer  

----------------- 

 阿尔敏·莱希 - 上海荣幸呈现马蒂亚斯·比泽尔(Matthias Bitzer)在画廊的第 六次个展《你于空间;空间于你》，同时这也是比泽尔在中国的首次个展。  

《你于空间;空间于你》中所展出的作品，可见艺术家转向内在的探索——他细 致斟酌了如何捕捉由人类时间、记忆和感知所相互交织而成、错综复杂的空间维度。 意大利物理学家卡洛·罗维利(Carlo Rovelli)认为时间的流动并不存在意识之中， 而是将时间的动态描述为“在过去某个时刻，宇宙中神秘的小概率事件的模糊映照”  。罗维利声称，时间之谜在于”我们可以感知到脉搏的跳动，深刻地感受内心深处记 忆的谜团，以及对未来的担忧。”在近期作品中借鉴了记忆灵感、现代主义中抽象的 形式经典、隐晦的文学暗示，和属于个人的符号象征，德国艺术家马蒂亚斯·比泽尔 的艺术实践，可说是与罗维利所提出的:“所谓时间，其实是有着许多结构、层次的 庞大复杂集合体”的主张不谋而合。  

与展览同题的作品，描绘了两名抽象的线条人物，其四肢巧妙地重叠交织在浅 蓝色背景之上。精心铺陈的极简构图中，唤起的是人类彼此在世界上所相互接触 的无数方式;但与此同时，每个个体依然保持着一贯的孤立。题为《帕耳开》(les Parques)的系列作品中，三名优雅的中性人物，身穿如同法国艺术家索妮娅·德劳 内(Sonia Delaunay)笔下充满抽象图案面料的几何服装，疏离地望着观众。画中  人物依据希腊神话中的命运三女神命名，这使他们显得既熟悉又陌生，既当代又具 历史意义，既具标志性但又默默无名。与其让观众接近他们，画中人物脸上亲昵强烈 的眼神，似乎强调了存在于观者和他们所观望对象之间的距离，那一道私密的空间。  

比泽尔强调，自己作品中的意义并非固定不变，而是通过观者在其个人的时间和 空间之中所体验到而产生的。他的作品拥有源于间隙空间的通透性:存在于抽象和具 象、绘画和雕塑、历史性和当代性之间的距离——以及在一个瞬间、一道印象、一种 与另种感知之间的差距。比泽尔在画布上以纤薄的颜料层层堆叠，呈现了平坦、严谨 和精确的视觉效果。然而只需再多花几分钟、再多看几眼，画中便会逐渐浮现出充满 隐没形体或延伸而出的维度，在图像的表面隐隐闪烁着。  

在《宝藏》(trésor)一画中，一张幽灵般的脸庞出现在一片整齐的彩色正方形网 格后。潜藏在正方形背后，这张朦胧的轮廓延伸到画面构图的边缘，与几何图层之间 所产生的视觉拉锯战，也让观者始终无法清晰辨识出画中人物全貌。但他似乎盘踞在 画里——甚至像是鬼魂般萦绕其中。人物廓形的裁切(我们也只看到被解构的脸庞 的痕迹)也赋予了画面一种近距离的及时性，又或是亲密感。但这也仍旧被画面的双 重性所混淆:几何图层自始自终都遮掩着画中人物，筑起一道与观众之间的距离。这 幅画还可以被掀开，通过嵌入定制框架的镜子，显露出它的背面。在这之中，我们所 能见到的也源自偶然，并同时取决于许多因素:展览空间的条件、物件的重力，以及 观者在展览空间中的移动，这些都能改变现场的空气流动而推动那道“门”的关闭。  

在比泽尔的世界观中，观看从来都不是一场静止不变的体验，而是一种片刻的、 充满变幻、将要成为什么的状态。  

文/杰西·哈迪维，策展人、作家  

 
Image:
Matthias Bitzer  
you in the space; the space in you, 2021
ink, acrylic, pins on canvas, artist frame
244 x 214 x 7 cm
96 1/4 x 84 1/4 x 2 3/4 in  
© Matthias Bitzer - Photo: Nick Ash
Courtesy of the Artist and Almine Rech  

Installation Images:
Matthias Bitzer, you in the space; the space in you
Almine Rech Shanghai
February 25 - March 31, 2022
© Matthias Bitzer - Courtesy of the Artist and Almine Rech
Photo: Alessandro Wang