DANIEL ARSHAM - UNEARTHED | KÖNIG GALERIE

When Daniel Arsham visits his solo show in Berlin.

With UNEARTHED, KÖNIG GALERIE presents Arsham‘s first solo exhibition in Berlin. On display are three monumental paintings and a series of sculptures that give the impression that antiquity has been excavated in the future.

Arsham transforms the nave of the former brutalist Church of St. Agnes into a hall of antiquities in front of rocky grotto worlds. The paintings show monumental sculptures that grow upwards in light-flooded caves. The busts are lined up on pedestals, as if the first collection of antiquities had just been opened to the public. As in the past, reproductions were used here to build up such a collection.

Daniel Arsham selected the pieces, he made the reproductions, which are actually reinterpretations made from volcanic ash and quartz crystals, among other things. Apollo, Venus, Caesar. Broken, dilapidated, eroded. Statues and statuettes. Busts and full body figures.

Otherwise known for turning iconic objects and figures of the media age like Blackberries and Pokémon into future relics of fictional archaeology, Arsham actually goes back thousands of years in history. The sculptures are well-known from antiquity. The allegory of the cave is familiar from philosophy. And yet nothing is as you know it. Instead of the shackled people, the ancient artefacts stand in the cave as if they were waiting to be discovered. The light is behind or above them and shines down on them, blinds and illuminates them. The people, tiny, stand before them like shadowy beings. They are the modern explorers who hope for archaic knowledge from the monumental sculptures. Arsham’s antiquity promises knowledge of the future in the present.

🗓 until OCTOBER 24
📍 ST. AGNES, BERLIN

➡️ Visit koenig.art to browse through the available works by Arsham.

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