Hans Peter Kuhn: Second View

Almost four years after his first solo exhibition at e/static, Hans Peter Kuhn comes back with a second show opening on Thursday 28th February 2008. This time he will be presenting at blank, e/static's new space located in via Reggio 27, three new works especially created for this occasion: large ink-jet prints depicting images from his own past artistic and personal experiences, which have been modified until unrecognizable. They merely consist of abstract backgrounds of pure colour, with low volume sounds coming from behind the prints. A work he created in 2006, Population II, will also be part of the exhibition. It's a rectangular marble slab containing 75 small speakers, each of them diffusing the same soft short sound, at first all together, then, because of a slight delay, with a difference of timing which soon reaches a sort of quietly chaotic dimension.
Kuhn is part of a Berlin-based scene including Rolf Julius, Christina Kubisch, Akio Suzuki (just to name a few), who've been working since the 70's on the connections between sound and image. He is also a composer and musician, and was a longtime collaborator of Robert Wilson: together, they won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 1993, for Memory/Loss. Moreover, he has often collaborated with modern dance masters such as Laurie Booth, Lucinda Childs, Dana Reitz, Sasha Waltz and Junko Wada.
Traces of his experience in the fields of theatre and dance clearly emerge in his work as a visual artist, characterized by an original research on the relationship between acoustic phenomena and the space where they take place. He also frequently uses light sources. These are always fixed, and are combined with multi-channel sonic emissions, that move randomly between the lights. In 2006, for the second edition of Sonambiente, at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, Kuhn displayed an extraordinary light and sound installation of that same kind, Labyrinth (meikyu 2). A few months earlier a similar one, Advertising, was selected for the 2005 edition of Constellations at Artissima, Turin's art fair.

Hans Peter Kuhn, born in 1952 in Kiel, has also created many big outdoor installations worldwide. Among the most important ones: The Pier in New York, 1996; an installation at Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, 1997; in Adelaide, 1998; then Marzahn, again in Berlin, 1998; others in Odense, 2005, for the 200th anniversary of Hans Christian Andersen's birth, and at the Liverpool Biennale, 2006. His works have been displayed at the ZKM in Karlsruhe, at the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh, at Berlin Neue Nationalgalerie, at Tokushima Modern Art Museum.