Chung King Project, Los Angeles, presents the work of “Hagel”, the result of the collaboration between two Leipzig artists Paule Hammer (born 1975) and Sebastian Gögel (born in 1978). For their US debut at Chung King Project Hammer and Gögel present a large sculpture and collaborative paintings. “In contrast to the painters of the Leipzig school, Gögel and Hammer seek in their work to use sculpture and spatial installations as media of expression to place pop over the sublime, thus combining a vital, penetrating power with a clever, sharp wit.” (PR Chung King Project). Chung King Project, Los Angeles, November 2006. By VTV correspondents Parichard Holm and Liza Foreman.
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“Sebastian Gögel and Paule Hammer have been collaborating on sculptural installations since 2005, combining the anthropomorphic characters from Gögel’s painting with Hammer’s associative configurations of drawings and collages. For both artists, the surface of the canvas is not enough; their expansion of the painted surface to the surrounding space is first of all due to an expansive pleasure in painting itself.
Their collaborative works move among the disciplines of installation, painting, and sculpture. They play with image and text, abstraction and comics, mobilizing oil paints, latex, cloth, construction foam, aluminum foil, and modeling clay. Their playful designs with easy gestures usually treat the everyday with a wickedly funny visual humor until it tips over into the grotesque, making elements of horror transform into weird bits of everyday life. Their three-dimensional escapades are at the same time macabre, restless and unmercifully entertaining.
With all their relics of pop culture, ironic adaptations of kitsch and horror, and apparent homage of chaos, the works of Gögel and Hammer are outfitted with their own perceptual program that consciously plays on the arbitrary in an ironic, nasty, laconic, and defiant way, and employs provocation and sources of irritation in a calculated fashion.” (PR Chung King Project).
Chung King Project is a collaborative project between Mihai Nicodim (Kontainer Gallery, Los Angeles), Nicholas Baker and Zoë Foster (fa projects, London) and Friedrich Loock (Wohnmaschine, Berlin).