Cyrill Lachauer – Birds

 

October 14 – November 26, 2022

Opening: Thursday, October 13, 2022 | 6–9 PM

B-Part Exhibition, Luckenwalder Str. 6b, 10963 Berlin

 

LOOCK Galerie is excited to announce that as of now it officially represents artist and photographer Cyrill Lachauer. This Thursday opens Lachauer's solo show at B-PART Exhibition featuring his work Birds (Nat. Geo. 1989–1999) for the first time, curated by Hans-Jörg Clement and sponsored by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation.

Lachauer on his body of work:
"As a teenager, I got a complete National Geographic collection from 1989 to 1999 from a friend of my parents. At that time, the magazines were only available in English and it was still a time when print media had the resources for high-quality work. The booklets were a treasure for me, as I was traveling a lot already, taking photographs and was considering to study ethnology. When I was working on the cycle 'The Adventures of a White Middle Class Man (From Black Hawk to Mother Leafy Anderson)', 2016–2017 at the Mississippi River, I engaged with signs and symbols of the Hobos, the American figure of the wanderer. Not wanting to appropriate any of their symbols, also known as zincs in German, I developed an abstracted, three-part shape of a griffin bird inspired by the eagles I encountered in the upper reaches of the Mississippi. In the 2017 exhibition 'What Do You Want Here' at the Berlinische Galerie, the bird's sign appeared both as a canvas object and as the cover of a newspaper conceived specifically for the exhibition.

Now, five years later, I continued to engage with birds, resulting in this body of work, where each individual collage consists of three parts, which were cut out analogously. I only used photographs that do not show people, but landscapes of whatever kind. Landscapes always form in the interaction with a variety of actors and are not subject to a nature-culture duality. The resulting birds show novel landscapes of decline, destruction, distant worlds but also birds of great beauty and sadness. In the course of the work, it became clear how damaged the earth was already in the years from 1989 to 1999 — from burning oil fields in Kuwait to the destruction of Amazonia — and the situation has not improved until today, but only further dramatically worsened. The birds show themselves as messengers of dying, but in their form and diversity also as messengers of hope in the sense of a call to remain restless (Donna Haraway, 2018). I understand them as co-beings that call us to action."