IMAGINE

“Imagine – 10 Unrealized Projects”

Kensise Anders, Filip Henin / Hainbach, Stefan Knauf, Brandon Lipchik, Sonja Rychkova, Jaanus Samma, Sevina Tzanou, Anna Virnich, Sonja Yakovleva and Jan Zöller & Martin Kähler.

Robert Grunenberg is pleased to announce the opening of the group show Imagine: 10 Unrealized Projects on the occasion of the 5th anniversary of the gallery. For the exhibition project, ten artists from the gallery program and beyond were invited to participate. Each contribution ought to embody an as-yet-unrealised project or be the first work of a new cycle in which new techniques, materials and topics are experimented with. The idea of the unrealised project is connected with the invitation to dream, to try something new and to deviate from familiar, established and successful strategies and practices.
The concept is inspired by the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, with whom Robert Grunenberg worked editorially before opening his gallery. Grunenberg edited and published numerous interviews by Obrist in which the question of an “Unrealized Project” came up regularly. At the same time, IMAGINE is also intended to document the gallery’s profile. The majority of the artists represented and exhibited were born between 1989 and the early 1990s. Most of them belong to the first generation that grew up with the culture of the Internet and digitalisation. Even if their artistic strategies seem different, there are fundamental connections. All of them work predominantly figuratively, with “classical” materials and media (painting, drawing, paper cut, sculpture). There are many close references to craft, folk art, decorative arts, techniques and media that often have feminine, domestic, or autodidactic connotations. Traditional or marginalised practices and materials are employed to expand them discursively and formally, often in a queer or feminist context.
The gallery program focuses in different ways on the complex relationship between civilisation and nature in the Anthropocene, gender, mythology and identity, and the examination of the legacy of colonialism and modernity. In this exhibition, too, the artists approach their topics primarily through the physical, analogue handling of certain materials or techniques, through gesture, effect, haptics, intuition, and subjectivity. This attitude of “hands-on” is not in opposition to the conceptual and analytical, is not a counter-reaction to the virtual and digital, and does not denote a “return” to the authentic. Rather, it represents an attempt to develop an undogmatic, more open, inclusive, and contemporary practice.

Images by: Roman März
Text by: Oliver Koerner von Gustrof


Opening hours during Gallery Weekend 
Friday, 28 April 2023
12 – 9 p.m. 
Opening Reception
6 – 9 p.m.

Exhibition on view
28 April – 17 June 2023













For more information, please contact the gallery:  mail@robertgrunenberg.com