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Somewhere between Kafka's colossal Natural Theater of Oklahoma and an utterly crowded central market, this exhibition is a reloading point for the rebellious odd and daring cool-headed ventures of sixteen young artists. The artists are either still enrolled or recently graduated from art school, so there is quite a lot to discover!

Each has their their own quarrels with modernism, and draws a bow from the utopic grand concepts at the beginning of the 20^th Century through nightmares, tragedies, and farces to an disillusioned as well as stimulated present. (It is all a matter of style or to express it another way: As dark, as devious and as insencire as art itself, the ways of El Lissitzky to Alexander Rodtschenko, Majakowskis LEF groups, David Smith, Anthony Caro, Ellsworth Kelly up to Bridget Riley, from Joseph Cornell, Aleister Crowleys A.·.A.·., James Glieck, Henri Michaux, Man Ray to Henri Matisse and Francis Picabia.)

With strong gesture, catatonic rapture and ample amusement this exhibition reconciles exoticism and rationalism, constructivism of the Russian school, surreal objects, Turkish fast food culture and occultism, hard edge and soft edge, and also the stylistic secrets of architecture and furniture with the mysteries of painting and sculpture. Be warned! They who miss the opportunity now, fail forever. They who keep the future in mind is one of us! Everybody is welcome! But watch out: There's more to us than that!

The Companions

Benjamin Katz has been striding the art world since the 1960's. Always carrying a Leica, if not two, in his breast pocket. Confederated and sometimes amused, he is observing everything this microcosmos has to offer. Capturing creators, dealers, patrons and other non-professional “his very own way”. Benjamin Katz takes his pictures spontaneously and without any flashlight. They are snapshots capturing life, its motives and themes, but also capturing Katz himself. Mostly hand developed, the photographs reveal a rare mixture of elegance, melancholy, romance and humour. The unique Katz touch.

His portraits of Beuys, Polke, Baselitz, Richter and other great artists are extraordinary and rightly exhibited in the world's biggest art institutions. However, his numerous other photographs are hardly known: photographs for which Katz puts the focus off his artist friends, revealing the surrounding (studios, restaurants, parks) and disclosing the context (walks, suspension, receptions) in an extended view. Katz himself is setting the frame for his art. These landscapes, insights and still lives are taken with the exact same technic, which he uses for his portraits: black and white, without flashlight and without lavish preparation. A kind of photograph that one would tend to call a portrait: portraits of trees, portraits of cups and bottles, portraits of steaks (!) as well as portraits of abandoned studios, sometimes without their owners, but still «inhabited».

For the first time, Benjamin Katz presents these “other” photographs. Through these pictures, he tells us much more, than what is portrayed. Photograph by photograph he shows us his own history of art.

Elegance, romance and humour also describe best Michel Würthle. Although the elegance of the Vienna-born is more flaming, the idea of romance darker and the humour more cutting. Driven by his dandified anti-conformism he left Vienna and the Art Academy for Naples and Rome, to spend a season in Africa and then move to the Paris of ´68. In 1972, he started his “Exile” in Berlin together with Ingrid and Oswald Wiener. Together with a business partner he took over the famous Paris Bar in 1979. Over the decades he became a legend of Berlin Nightlife.

Michel Würthle's deep friendships to numerous artists are widely known. Often he was the first to collect their art. Less known are certain boozy conversations which laid the foundation of some four-handed paintings, collages and texts (in collaboration with HaralampiOroschakoff, Damien Hirst, Cosima von Bonin, Martin Kippenberger, Daniel Richter, Walter Pichler, Herbert Volkmann and others). As well as the fact, that his lust for life and nocturnal odysseys inspired him to own drawings and lithographies, that are sometimes pornographic and always black humoured. But his chronicles, that approach the ones of Otto Dix and George Grosz, also have a sunny side: The drawings made on Syros, his asylum. There, united with his beloved wife Caterina, an amazing richness of colourful landscape sketches illustrates his plan of an utopian valley, with houses, halls, studios and basins, souk and cafe Rimbaud & Rambo... A kind of Phalanstère for artists.

The Bourouina Gallery is proudto present these two exceptional personalities. Two, that accompany the stars of contemporary art since decades without ever being overshadowed by them. Benjamin Katz and Michel Würthle enter into an artistic dialog and we benefit from their peculiar view on the world - and their remarkable juvenility.

The Bourouina Gallery is pleased to show with Tisch & Tafel (table & board )the works of Michael Biber and Mirko Tschauner for the first time in Berlin.

The paintings of Michael Biber arecomposed of basic forms: rectangles, triangles, circles. They play with relations, the positive and the negative, depth andplane and the positioning of objects in the pictoral space. Asymmetry, rhythm and various fragments emerge in place of harmony. The kind of approach equals a permanent test arrangement. Structure adds up to the coherence: on naked aluminium panels meet stress marks, imprints and digital patterns that are brought into the classical form of the collage by ripping, cutting and glueing. These fragile compositions tend to rub: they rise over the rack, seem to stick out, are attached and play with the boundary. The recurrant question is how the arrangements position themselves in the pictoral space. This is what brings in the disturbing quality in Biber's work. Formerly alternative categories suddenly meld and overlie: concreteness and abstraction, fiction and documentation.

The sculptures of Mirko Tschauner are static material-compositions. Their reduced chromaticity is a result of the materials used: concrete, natural stone or steel. These matters are cut or cast into basic geometric forms. Their assembly results from simple composition methods such as mirroring, twisting, tilting and layering. The sculptures seem to be freed of their actual weight. The heavy-weight formations annex the room with a mysterious and omnious lightness. This tention – is the sculpture stable, in balance or will it fall ? – brings in the feeling of a sudden stopped dynamic to his works. The materials of Mirko Tschauners sculptures are omnipresent, though unrecognized as facades, lampposts or staircases. Detached from their architectural and functional context, the glimpsed perceived flashes up in Tschauners sculptures as fragments. Hereby his works become memory fragments of urban everyday life.

The artists approaches are formally alike and reveal themselves in their interplay: Both search for concreteness in abstraction. Their art does neither describe, nor illustrate. Still one can see realism in their works: material realism. Their materials are of industrial source. Color, form and materiality originate from fabrication which brings in an automated moment, a spark of coincidence. The final works are characterized by a certain displacement: The real surfaces are shifted – displaced – and with them their original beeing.