Tim Berresheim

Meliksetian | Briggs is pleased to present Aus alter Wurzel neue Kraft new works by German artist Tim Berresheim.  The show is Berresheim’s first solo exhibition in the United States since 2010’s Future Gipsy Antifolklore (What?!) in New York City. 

The title of the exhibition, which translates to New Strength from an Old Root, can be read as a programmatic affirmation of the present for Berresheim’s entire oeuvre; more precisely, Berresheim’s transformation of traditional pictorial and representational concepts by means of the technological media-oriented possibilities of a present that is largely determined by the ongoing process of digitalization. At the same time, it concerns a motto employed in the early 20th-century by German shooter's guilds that is usually illustrated by a new twig sprouting from a tree stump.

The “old root” referenced by the works is not only the panel picture that is still the most prominent presentational format in the field of fine art, but also the computer, which for the past fifty years has been available as a tool to generate images. According to Berresheim, it is still primarily being used in the sense of a “doubling of the world” or simulating the world as standardized by one-point perspective, and thus not used to the full extent of its potential. The root cited above is symbolized by a lemon with male attributes – still fragrant but, as can be seen on the exhibition poster, simultaneously dependent on a walking aid and notepad. Like the figure of the wanderer that appeared as the symbol of Berresheim’s in the 2014 solo exhibition Auge und Welt at the Düsseldorf Kunstverein, a transitional exhibition, the lemon figure was also prepared by the illustrator Andi Thissen. In conjunction with Aus alter Wurzel neue Kraft, the figures conceived by Thissen typifying central aspects of Berresheim’s aesthetic concept (such as ambiguity, coherence or additive knowledge) will be presented for the first time in the form of a separate group of prints.

These figures furthermore appear on the body surfaces of one of the aspettatori in Berresheim’s large-scale works. These “waiting figures” are typical of Berresheim’s most recent work, and like the other distinctive figures appearing in the earlier works are surrounded by selected objects, in this case from the subject area of “strength training” (for example, boxing gloves or protein supplements). In the case of the liner notes for the reissue of Stürmer, the 1981 debut album of the West German band F.S.K., power and strength were associated with cheerfulness and optimism. It is by no means coincidental that the resulting specific form of modernity by an “anti-folklore” band that had already emphatically said “yes!” to the modern world on their first single could be transferred to Tim Berresheim’s present miserabilism-defying works.