45cbm: BURGHARD

BURGHARD (artists Romy and Stef Richter) develop installation-based works which are composed of a great number of different, often everyday materials. Objects made from glass, porcelain, stone, or an overhead projector as well as pages from magazines are withdrawn from their familiar contexts and understood as cultural instruments and sediments. They oscillate between materiality and mediality. The physicality of the objects is set in relation to other referential and contextual levels. When their former meaning collapses, these arrangements can be intensely experienced and their hidden contingency comes to the fore.

BURGHARD began to formulate an artistic point of view in the 1990s, at a moment when the ideas of Institutional Critique that drew on 1960s and 1970s conceptual practices was reaching out to political, relational und philosophical questions and concerns. In the works they deveoped more recently, the artists tend to shift their main field of work from the exhibition galleries more and more into public space.

For their exhibition at 45cbm, the studio space of the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, BURGHARD operate with the ambiguous term "Ordnung" (engl. order, regime, arrangement). It is used as an open framework for arrangements that are made up of sculptural, filmic and photographic elements. Poetic sensibility and fragileness characterize their objects that serve to designate the occasional spaces of void that our thoroughly organised society leaves unfilled. In their non-complicancy the artists translate the totalitarian linearity of the prevailing regime ("Ordnung") into a more open plurality.

In correspondence with the exhibition BURGHARD will release their new  book "BURGHARD earlyears" (publisher: Verlag für moderne Kunst, Nurnberg) that is a collection of works the artists produced over the past ten years. The exhibition is curated by Jakob Racek.