reviews ben cottrell
Ben
Cottrell:
Day for
night
Galerie ben K aufm ann, berlin
3 novem ber – 22 December
British artist Ben Cottrell has been living and working
in Berlin since 2001. Alongside Mariola Groener he
also runs the artists’ space Forever and a Day Büro,
originally based on Kreuzberg’s Schlesische Strasse
but now to be found in various locations around
Berlin and beyond, and in the past few years his
prolific output has become something of a mainstay
in the capital. For this, his second solo show at Galerie
Ben Kaufmann, Cottrell has invested the mixed-
media environment of his space-specific installation
– combining drawing, painting, collage and sculpture
– with the same energy and forthright physicality of
previous shows.
The narrative into which Day for Night draws
you, in part determined by the pull of sun and moon,
is undeniably serpentine. Darkness and light vie with
one another in each individual work. In his large-
scale, explosively colourful, half-crazed paintings
such as Spirit and Body of the Earth (all works 2007)
– which line the walls of the gallery and serve also to
frame the heavy wooden Gate set a little way back
from the centre of the room – one is inducted into
a world which seems to undermine, incorporate and
explore the persistent trappings of expressionism and
the modern imagination. Horror, psychosis and pop-
cultural paranoia not only run deep in this show but
are always close to the surface.
These are also tools for critically investigating
our predilection for the irrational, the horrible and the downright ungovernable, in society as in
Planet Breath, 2007, collage,
30 x 21 cm. courtesy Galerie
nature. Gate is at once monumental, dark and, thanks to the multiple swirling, scrolling cut-out ben Kaufmann, berlin
shapes which cover almost its entire surface, eerily illuminated. One is left unsure as to whether
this, and the show, is the entrance to some Edenic heaven or hell, a temple or Poe’s House of
Usher. She, one of a series of three collages, incorporates found photographs of great American
landscapes – snow-capped mountains, lush green forests, crystal-blue lakes and Mojave Desert-
like rocky outcrops – seen through the apertures created by a woman’s face delineated in black,
putting one in mind both of graphic novelist Charles Burns’s apocalyptic 1970s suburban-gothic
masterpiece Black Hole (1995–2005) and a Technicolor Ansel Adams by way of Isaac Asimov.
Planet Breath employs a similar technique, although this time the landscape is apparently lost
in deep space, the face in front a sinister hybrid figure, part demon, part Chewbacca, its eyes
glowing fluorescent violet. The same trick is repeated in the painting Three Sisters, recalling
images of nubile undead zombie women, David Cronenberg’s Scanner (1981) and the seductive
sisters – the brides of Dracula – who by turns haunt, seduce and destroy. Day and Night is
thoughtful, provocative (necessarily so) and hugely enjoyable, succeeding in capturing the
eye and the imagination equally. If this is the kind of thing Cottrell is capable of, long may he
proliferate. Luke Heighton
artreview 126
JAN_REVIEWS.indd 126 4/12/07 15:38:55
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