Coagulate Year: 2008
Moving Image New York March 7th – 10th , 2013 Waterfront New York Tunnel
269 11th Avenue Between 27th and 28th Streets New York, NY 10001
www.moving-image.info/
Water coagulates, an eel breathes on land, like a human being; and a watery surface floats horizontally in the air, defying the law of gravity. In his video Coagulate, Mihai Grecu breaks the physical laws of nature, allowing his protagonist, water, to run through a timeless choreography. In various sequences, we experience water as outdoors and indoors, in its natural environment and in the bare shell of an industrial building, while the viewer witnesses an experiment. Grecu puts the water into unnatural states by making it digitally “coagulate”, either in a still or in a continuous loop.
The viewer is deceived by the paradoxical concept of a fluid sculpture. By overlapping several layers and soundtracks, the artist presents an inverted world: sturgeon and eel are apparently capable of surviving in the atmosphere, since one clearly hears the noise of breathing. The human being, on the other hand, breathes with his head under water, while the arches of his ribs look like gills. Through the mysterious aesthetics and elegance of his images, Grecu takes viewers to the limits of their visual perception.
(Catalogue text by Helen Wobbe, in: Videonale 12, 2009, p. 56f.)
About The Gallery
The Hengesbach Gallery was founded 1991 in Wuppertal by Rolf Hengesbach under the name Räume für neue Kunst. It developed out of the necessity to create concentrated art-experiences through a close cooperation with the artists. On February 7th 1992 the gallery oepend the first exhibition. In 2002 the Gallery moved to Cologne, in Summer 2009 it opened the current space in Berlin at Checkpoint Charlie. In Wuppertal the gallery still runs a dependance named Kunstraum Hengesbach.
The gallery owns ideal exhibition conditions after an extensive modification, which recovered the original character of the industrial hall. The puristic straightness of the gallery space offers sufficient free space for a divers gallery program with a focus on painting and photography, as well as sculpture and media art. The Charlottenstreet houses several other galleries which are one of the centres for Contemporary Art in Berlin.
A close co-operation with public museums and exhibition-places has developed over 20 years. Texts have been written together with high quality catalogue publications. The gallery program doesn’t follow any special artistic directions. Regardless of artistic media or form, the program accentuates in focusing on the aesthetical virtuosity to express the complexity of nowadays life.
