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GROVE LONDON
The Great American Songbook
10/02/24 - 01/03/24
GROVE BERLIN
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Sweat
A Group Exhibition featuring Mariona Berenguer, Hannah Bohnen, and Colm Mac Athlaoich
26/04/23 - 25/05/23
GROVE Berlin
Greifswalderstr. 5, Berlin 10405, DE
Opening: Wednesday, April 26th, 6-9 pm
Greifswalderstr. 5, Berlin 10405, DE
GROVE is pleased to present the upcoming exhibition Sweat, a group exhibition featuring Mariona Berenguer, Hannah Bohnen, and Colm Mac Athlaoich, on view at GROVE’s Berlin location from Wednesday, April 26th to Thursday, May 25th, 2023. This is the first time the gallery has worked with Berenguer and Bohnen, and marks the first time Mac Athlaoich, one the gallery’s represented artists, has shown in Berlin.A Group Exhibition featuring Mariona Berenguer, Hannah Bohnen, and Colm Mac Athlaoich
26/04/23 - 25/05/23
GROVE Berlin
Greifswalderstr. 5, Berlin 10405, DE
Opening: Wednesday, April 26th, 6-9 pm
Greifswalderstr. 5, Berlin 10405, DE
Sweat considers various forms of movement and the labour that movement can indicate. In some instances, as is the case with Mac Athlaoich’s work, the bodily labour is self-evident, depicting athletes strenuously pushing their bodies to their limits. As such, Mac Athlaoich’s work’s capture the poeticism in the duality of exertion and release, his figures depicted often as they cross the finish line. What’s more, the inputs and outputs of this labour constitute a self-serving loop: the athlete exerts energy so they can achieve victory, and thus plaudits for themselves.
However, Mariona Berenguer dismantles this loop, drawing simultaneous parallels between exertion’s bestial roots – movement as a fundamentally animalistic act — and the obfuscation of labour when sublimated into broader, very human, socio-economic systems. Horse tails and repurposed overalls reveal themselves to be disturbingly apt bedmates, highlighting linkages that often remain invisible.
Finally, Bohnen finds a middle ground in exploding our seemingly wasted movements, enlarging and drawing attention to our forgotten scribbles and gestures. Evoking both the cords of landline phones and the doodles we often mindlessly jot down mid-conversation, her work across media appears both foreign and deeply intimate, surprising us in the potential aesthetic qualities of markings we might otherwise discard. Further, her sculpture’s deceptive strength takes the levity of the gesture and brings gravity to the room – soaked in concrete, the physical and metaphorical weight of her work is an insistence on making their presence felt.
For GROVE, Sweat continues the gallery’s nascent program in Berlin, melding the gallery’s extant roster with exciting new voices. In this interplay, the gallery hopes to introduce a German audience to their previous work, while inflecting it with local talent and context.
