Candy pink foam carpet lines the floors and walls of Haus am Lützowplatz, transforming the art space into one continuous field of vision. The scene is set by Heiner Franzen for “Großes Gesichtsfeld” [Great Field of Vision], the artist’s first institutional solo show in Berlin. This eye-popping exhibition build fits neatly into Franzen’s decades-long career. His work has no beginning or end: Drawings, videos and sculptures comprise his perpetual portfolio are reworked, stripped back and layered over time. For this show, Franzen dips into his archive to present works such as “Schaukel”, a hypnotic video loop of a man struggling against his tranquilizer chair — a continuation of the artist’s exploration of confinement and how we move within it. The performative act of speech is another topic which has kept Franzen busy over the years; here represented by a series of mouths animated in stop motion. The blurry bottom half of an “O” says “friend” over and over, and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s flipped, warped face creaks as it attempts to emulate a human smile. The works evoke the style of lo-fi gifs but have in fact been painstakingly cut, filmed and pasted together over and over again. They leave our eyes searching for respite, only to be confronted with the searing pink backdrop, which reminds us to take another look at the shadows flickering in our peripheral vision. (Text: Anna Dorothea Ker / Artworks: Heiner Franzen / Portrait: Andreas Bohlender)
Haus am Lützowplatz, Lützowplatz 9, 10785 Berlin-Tiergarten; map
Heiner Franzen: Großes Gesichtsfeld, through 5.8.2018, Tue-Sun 11-18h
