Press Release On the Taste of an Apple

On the Taste of an Apple. Works from the collection with guests

April 24 to September 17, 2023
Opening: April 23, 2023, 11am

From Sunday, 23 April 2023, PEAC Museum Freiburg will be presenting the new exhibition „Vom Geschmack eines Apfels – Eine Sammlungspräsentation mit Gästen“ (On the Taste of an Apple—An exhibition of works from the collection with guests). This exhibition takes the most recent works by American artist Joseph Marioni as its starting point, which are being presented in Europe for the first time on the occasion of his 80th birthday. The physical palpability of color and light in his large-format paintings evoke an intimate and sensual relationship between the work and the viewer. “Vom Geschmack eines Apfels” relates his paintings to works from the Paul Ege Art Collection that expand classical conceptions of the image: How can space, body and the artwork be understood as parts of a holistic sensory experience—through the artistic media of video, sculpture and painting over a temporal horizon from the 1960s to the present day?

Radical Painting and Joseph Marioni

Radical Painting is one of the Paul Ege Art Collection’s central themes. The monochrome, abstract movement emerged in the 1970s through a process of intensive, transatlantic exchange and explores the basic conditions of painting. At the core of the quiet, meditative works lies a self-referential inquiry into their elemental components of material, color, support, format, and tool. Joseph Marioni’s works are born out of these considerations. They first capture the viewer’s attention as physical objects that refer to nothing other than their own materiality. The subtly tapered canvases serve as supports for a variety of vertically oriented paint applications, which flow into sculptural paint drips at the open edges of the paintings. Yet the works do not remain self-contained objects, but rather open up to the viewer: The fluctuating degree of transparency of the paint layers creates a pictorial depth that manifests itself as dematerialized light, radiating a powerful allure. Through this relationship, the artwork morphs from a passive object into an active subject, a presence vis-à-vis the viewer.

Joseph Marioni was born in Cincinnati, OH (USA) in 1943 and lives and works in New York, NY (USA). He has participated in numerous international solo and group exhibitions, including: KOLUMBA Museum Cologne 2021, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg 2019, Museum Wiesbaden 2018, Kunstmuseum Bern (CH) 2017, Philadelphia Museum of Art/Philadelphia (USA) 2015, The Phillips Collection/Washington D.C. (USA) 2011, Museum Fine Arts Budapest (HU) 2010. His works are represented in private and public collections such as Whitney Museum of American Art, Basel Kunstmuseum, Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, La Collection Jumex, Malmö Kunsthal, Abteiberg Museum and others.

The exhibition

“Vom Geschmack eines Apfels” juxtaposes Marioni’s works with works that have emerged out of the increasing detachment from classical conceptions of the image within the timeframe of the museum’s collection history. How does the relationship between work, space, and viewer shift in the sculptural works of American minimalist artist Carl Andre or in Dieter Kiessling’s interactive video installation? The common thread running through all the works in the exhibition is that they open themselves up to the viewer, whose physicality they challenge as the basis of an aesthetic experience. The title of the exhibition is borrowed from a text by the Argentine poet Jorge Luis Borges: “The taste of the apple [...] lies in the contact of the fruit with the palate, not in the fruit itself; in a similar way [...] poetry lies in the meeting of poem and reader, not in the lines of symbols printed on the pages of a book. What is essential is the aesthetic act, the thrill, the almost physical emotion that comes with each reading.” This creates a continuous interplay between reason and feeling, materiality and representation, conscious and unconscious, in which one’s own self is reflected.
Featuring works by Carl Andre, Michał Budny, Alan Charlton, Günther Holder, Dieter Kiessling, Joseph Marioni, Andrea Ostermeyer, Nikola Ukić, Elisabeth Vary, Michel Verjux.

PEAC Museum

PEAC Museum, which houses the collection of contemporary art named after the Freiburg entrepreneur and collector Paul Ege, is located on the premises of the Alexander Bürkle electrical wholesale company and technology service provider, managed by the third generation of the Ege family, in the industrial area of northern Freiburg. The exhibition rooms, which opened in 2004 on the company premises under the name “Kunstraum Alexander Bürkle”, extend over 1,000 square meters and have made a professional museum presentation of the Paul Ege Art Collection possible. Since fall 2019, the collection has been operating under the name PEAC Museum. Since February 2023, the museum has been under the direction of Lea Altner and Eveline Weber.

Information

PEAC Museum Robert-Bunsen-Str. 5 79108 Freiburg i. Br.
Tel. +49 (0)761–5106 600
team@peac.digital
www.peac.digital
Instagram @peac.digital

Opening hours

Tuesday–Friday from 11am–5pm, Sundays and public holidays from 11am–5pm Admission is free of charge.