Artists

Simon Lässig, Vera Lutz

Press release

Opening: Friday, May 9, 7-10 pm

Simon Lässig and Vera Lutz’s first institutional exhibition, Romeo's eyes, at Kunstverein München brings together newly developed filmic, photographic, and installative works that explore the processes of seeing and showing. This is an exhibition of two artists working alongside, and in response to, one another. In this sense, the duo show also serves as a framework for their ongoing dialogical practice, which began ten years ago in Munich.

The artists’ practices are conjoined through an engagement with different modalities of language and space, and through a shared inquiry into the construction of the self. Lutz’s works often take the physical characteristics of the exhibition space as a starting point. They are informed by their surrounding elements, while at the same time mimicking, exaggerating, or altering them in response. Her newly conceived works—an immersive video installation and an expansive sculpture—reflect on self-referentiality and processes of perception, emphasizing the connection between the material body of the work and the relational framework that structures it. In this way, the artist examines dispositifs of display and concealment, framing and subjectivity. In his practice, Lässig, by contrast, negotiates mimetic processes and conditioned forms of seeing, particularly as they emerge in early childhood and are methodologically embedded within the medium of film. Against this backdrop, his new photographic prints and table sculptures become a means of looking at the space that opens up between imitation and construction, making visible what is already there. Both artists’ works unfold through methods of sequencing (of rooms, of images, of the gaze) as well as through gestures of recourse to previously established formal and narrative strategies. What emerges is not a resolution, but a sustained inquiry: a shared attentiveness to the processes of seeing and to the quiet operations of form, memory, and meaning.

Romeo’s eyes also expands into other registers, which Lässig and Lutz consider as equal to the works developed for the exhibition. In this context, the artists have invited writer Alexandra Symons-Sutcliffe to contribute a text to the accompanying brochure as literary response to some of the concerns occupying the artists’ works. Furthermore, a program of events was conceived by them, including a lecture by poet, translator, and literary scholar Jennifer Scappettone, as well as a screening of the film Lunch Break by artist Sharon Lockhart.