Ausstellung „Alt wie der Westerwald“

Description

An exhibition by Henrik Schrat in connection with his five-volume complete edition of Grimm's fairy tales published by Textem Verlag Hamburg. Old as the Westerwald - The title comes from the Grimms' fairy tale “Die Wichtelmänner”. One of the gnome texts, number 39 in the Grimm collection, features a character who is as gruesome as he is legendary. The changeling. A newborn is swapped by elves for a changeling, a stubborn, voracious and ancient creature with large eyes. One method of changing it back is to make the creature speak. In the text, this is achieved by boiling water in eggshells and the changeling reveals its age in the “Altersspruch” and can thus be swapped back for the baby. “now I am as old as the Westerwald, and have not seen anyone boiling in shells.” The equation of a newborn with an ancient being plays with eternity and new beginnings and can also be located in the dream of eternal youth. The exhibition takes its origins from these Grimm fairy tales, texts written over 200 years ago, which are simple and always repeatable, only age very slowly and which themselves raise the question of the permanent fountain of youth and of a new interpretation.

Henrik Schrat explores this in his new complete edition and the exhibitions curated for it, examining the texts for their current significance and placing them in a contemporary context with rich illustrations. In this exhibition, the question of the magical moment in which duration and transformation coincide is crucial. There are places where time stands still, where the baby may remain forever young. The places and people that play a role in the artists' exhibited works originate from this mixture. They are places outside of a rational time, whose mythological depth is reinterpreted with contemporary set pieces. The figures are exchanged, reshaped, cloned and soaked in spirit. These are the moments when magic happens, or deception, as the case may be. The oscillation between the beauty of the childlike and the horror of the deadly clown. The original drawings by Ludwig Emil Grimm, the Grimms' brother who painted, and Otto Ubbelohde, one of the most important Grimm illustrators, come from a different era and are given a contemporary context in this exhibition. We would like to thank Mr. Ludwig Rinn for the loans. translated with deepl..