LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL

"All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their entrances and their exits; and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages.”

Like the monologue by Jacques in Shakespeare’s As You Like It, the new exhibition at Galerie Deadfly, Berlin, Life Is Beautiful, catalogues man’s passage of time through the different stages of life, from infancy to old age. 

Never before have images of our lives been so immediate and easily disseminated as in recent times. Enda O’ Donoghue’s work deals with the mediation of these images, working predominantly with found images, sourced from the Internet. O’ Donoghue uses a methodical process of transformation and translation into the medium of painting. The photos with which he works are most often the throw-away shots of banal scenes which otherwise gather the digital equivalent of dust buried away on hard-drives, camera chips, mobile phones, or uploaded and then lost and forgotten someplace on the Worldwide Web.

Likewise, Helen Knowles’ art is originally sourced from the internet. In contrast to O’ Donoghue, Knowles utilizes her electronic device to intrude deeper and deeper into spaces that were once reserved for solitude, reflection and privacy. Using birth videos plundered from Youtube, Knowles unpicks the threads of cultural attitudes to new life and looks to unravel the trouble that audiences have with certain kinds of images. 

Rose Ruane’s practice is driven by an interest in self mythology, emotional manipulation & the indestructible teenager within the adult. Drawing on the history of performance art, psychoanalytic theories of narcissism and the complexities of female sexual identity, she creates videos which evoke the pathetic, the erotic and the abject, all in equal measure.  

The photographer Fred Peterson documents and reshuffles recognizable elements from the ‘real world’, making it difficult to tell where life pauses for a snapshot and art begins. As Peterson points out with his photography, the constant movement of life never stops, even when photographing the most inanimate entities.

With a casual gesture, Ingo Gerken initially starts a process with a pointed surface, which presents the challenge of an accelerated association. His photographs, sculptures and installations make comments on hierarchical commensurabilities and perspectives, in which private and social processes are always linked. The individual is part of a system whose structures must be permanently verified. After all, something always threatens to topple over, dissolve or disappear.

Perhaps no other artists quite capture the different stages of life in Shakespeare’s ‘As You Like It’ better than the Glasgow based duo, Beagles and Ramsay. Since they first started working together in 1997, they have created many mutations of themselves, from childlike ventriloquist dummies to posthumous skulls. Their twisted humour explores the seedy, unsavoury side of contemporary culture and the malaise of modern life, perhaps as an exorcism of the unhealthy, the dark, the selfish and cynical sides of their (and our personalities), so they/we can get on and live a clean, optimistic and a beautiful life...

 Like art, perhaps the true beauty of life is not that we have been flung at random between the profusion of the earth and the galaxy of the stars, but that we can fashion images of ourselves sufficiently powerful to remind ourselves that truly, Life Is Beautiful. 

                                                                                                 
                                                                                        

Galerie Deadfly
Niederbarnimstraße 15
10247 Berlin
http://www.galeriedeadfly.biz