ART-PRESENTATION:Anna Oppermann-Neverending Paradox

Anna Oppermann is still little known, but is a key figure of the German Avant-Garde, during her career as an artist, she received considerable criticism for her chaotic and obsessive installations she called “Ensembles”. The sheer amount of material contained within each of the 60 “Ensembles” she created made the works difficult to comprehend , the closer one got to read a particular note or see a photograph properly, the further away one got from the collection of ephemera as a whole.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: S.M.A.K. Archive

Anna Oppermann’s visually powerful multipart “Ensembles” of objects, photos, paintings and texts look as if they are growing out of walls or corners towards the viewer. The exhibition “Anna Oppermann: Neverending Paradox-Philosophical Ensembles of the late 1980s” is on presentation at S.M.A.K. in Gent. In the ‘80s Anna Oppermann became involved in the postmodernity debate, where she continually encountered ambiguities and paradoxes that make her work particularly relevant to our globalised society. Using her ensemble method, the artist uniquely connected the conceptual and formal aspects of the art of the ‘60s. But at the same time, her works appear as proactive reflections on the network models of today’s digital scene. Anna Oppermann first presented these methodical arrangements of drawings, photographs, objects, things she found, and painted canvases in Hamburg and Trier in the early ‘70s. This special mix of conceptual, processual, graphical, and spatial art quickly gained the artist international recognition. Oppermann participated, among other important exhibitions, in documenta 6 and documenta 8, held in Kassel, as well as the biennials in Venice (1980) and Sydney (1984). Oppermann saw the world and human relations as “Ensembles”, as mutable constellations of perception and reflection, of norms, stories, emotions, and theories. She believed that “Complexity must still have value somewhere in this world.” Observing her private and social everyday life in detail, she sought to find objects, images, and concepts that seemed to her to encapsulate its abysses, absurdities, and areas of conflict. She made drawings, photographs, pain- tings, described what she found, she collected texts and quotations, and arranged all these components in “Ensembles”. These installations were photographed from various perspectives and in changing constellations and the photographs were then in turn integrated in new stagings, lending her works their unique openness. The individual “Ensembles” develop not in a linear way but in ramified and cross-linked episodes, they grow in time and space and obey no clear chronology, nor is such a chronology palpable in Anna Oppermann’s oeuvre as a whole. Her engagement with the relation between appearance, reality, and I/Self, which shapes Anna Oppermann’s entire work, is the dominant theme in her early “Mirror Ensemble” (1968–89) as well as her last large scale work, “Paradoxical Intentions” (1988–92), which face each other in the exhibition. “Being an Artist-On the Method” (1978–85), revolves around themes such as the state of being an outsider, norms and their violation, inclusion and exclusion. The Ensemble “Gesture of Pathos-MGSMO” (1984-92) is a result of Oppermann’s reflections upon the economic aspects of making art and of the art market.

Info: S.M.A.K., Jan Hoetplein 1, Gent, Duration: 11/3-4/6/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 9:30-17:30, Sat-Sun 10:00-18:00, http://smak.be