Sorcha Dallas

On the occasion of the inauguration of our new gallery space Galerie Gisela Capitain is delighted to invite you to the international group show Keep passing the open windows or Happiness.

The invited artists are standing with their works in a new context of aesthetic, social and intellectual connections between Europe and the US, a connection which also had a special impact on the program of Gisela Capitain throughout the 80s and 90s. It is also characteristic for the young program of BROADWAY 1602 in New York, a gallery founded a year ago by the curator of the show Anke Kempkes.

Some philosopher of modern times and good intents believed - assuming the post-war human being aspires a state of happiness unburdened by necessity, empty of labour, an unrealistic utopia of freedom and leisure - that happiness can only be acheived where exhaustion and regeneration, pain and release, strike a perfect balance. Labour of happiness.

But what if for some mildly heroic individuals of today - who equipped themselves with excessively fine tuned senses detecting a growing grotesque, stalkers on the threshold to formless conflict and chaos, the sizing of new uniforms, criminal attempts of deception, or just cruel transparency of political target - lets assume that for these escapist guards of the contemporary, suffering from nostalgic pains, black headaches and white fevers, optimists of a silly marvellous kind, fantasizing not to get consumed by streets of boiling asphalt, great travel experts of freezing temperature - to achieve balance might be a less healthy, murkier, but no less perfect effort of passing the open windows - a kind of happiness.

Glasgow based artist Charlie Hammond shows two paintings Chance Domesticated, (2005) and After Eating Bad Horsemeat (2006) as well as the sculpture Untitled (2006). Hammond’s marble faces are grotesque grimaces with subtle characters while another group of recent works are portraits painted with a brush attached to a drilling machine. In these funnily sketchy works the artists plays with a certain cryptic idiosyncratic aesthetic of outsider art. The larger than life plaster sculpture consists of a pair of striding legs, a roughly executed displaced torso whose giant existentialist clumsy looks feels like a dazzling fusion of Giacometti, Breker and a Hollywood mummy.