Benjamin Hirte. Winter
17 January - 1 March
Pop is a serious business and winter is comprehensive. End of March last year, children were still sitting on window sills counting countless snowflakes, lacking vitamin B. It was a long grim time of year at its finale, when a friend came up with the productive worry: What if it never ends? In diagrams winter predominantly forms the graphical valley or long tail, sparing some factors linked to the need for warmth and food - emotionally and physically.
Love, career, creativity, economy, vibrancy can all fall below zero and result in burnout, melancholia, lack of innovation and neatness, psychograms of sparse landscapes with trunks, leafless trees, spots of brown soil in a white semigloss blanket - garnished with some greenish leftovers in a vegetative state.
Her own dance moves, though tricky, mostly consist of flicking her extremities (the dozen or so dancers, meanwhile, do quintuple backflips and jog upside down in DayGlo hamster wheels, the latter exercise occasioned by the self-referential song “Scream & Shout,” which is presided over by a house-sized hologram of will. i. am chanelling the Wizard of Oz). There are no live-cast close-ups of the performer’s face, probably a huge relief for someone who has to muster the energy to do this one hundred times.
Baby one more time, Kevin McGarry, artforum.com, 08.01.14
Granted pleasure, unrestrained sorrow
Messingkauf Dialogues, Bertolt Brecht
Benjamin Hirte (b. 1980, lives and works in Vienna) studied at Akademie der Bildenden Künste Wien. Previous exhibitions include ”noDs Ts”, Benjamin Hirte & Marie Lund, works sited, Los Angeles, 2013; “Grand Opening”, Frutta Gallery, Rome, 2013; “Flat Bed”, Joe Sheftel Gallery, New York, 2013; “A to K”, Galerie Emanuel Layr, Vienna, 2012 (solo); “The classic mob ballet”, MAK, Vienna, 2012 (solo); “A wavy line is drawn across the middle of the original plans”, Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, 2012; “Ruhmlose Tage”, COCO (Contemporary Concerns), Vienna, 2011; "Benjamin Hirte & Lone Haugaard Madsen", Grazer Kunstverein, Graz, 2010.
Benjamin Hirte, Christian Andersen, Copenhagen
http://christianandersen.net/exhibitions/benjamin-hirte-winter/