Press release Galerie Jarmuschek + Partner: ISOMERE

For the fist time in a solo exhibition, Jarmuschek+Partner presents the drawings of the Berlin based artist Petra Lottje. Especially known for her videoworks, for which she has been awarded with numerous prizes and received a remarkable media resonance, she now adds a series of discrete drawings to these videos. The outlines of the out-of-one-line formed humans seem almost minimalistic. With never ending and everything connecting lines, she is searching for shapes and borders of the tangible. Through the placement of groups, couples or single persons in front of a blank background she refers to the materiality of the drawn as well as the universality of the displayed situations, codes and conflicts. Like a chemist, the artist examines the single components of human relations, to observe them carefully in their reaction space. The programmatic exhibition title “Isomere” contains a scientific-analytic approach. Isomere (greek: equal parts) are chemical compounds with the same essential formula, but different structures and characteristics.Even though everything and everyone is characterized by various traits, they are nevertheless made of the equal parts like their environment. On the one hand, this metaphor emphasizes the dislimning boundaries between the pairings in Lottje’s drawings -e.g. of individuals and their environment-, on the other hand it lets the interchangeability of the individual interrelate tensely with its irreplaceability, because the “Isomere”, even though they are diverse, weave an impenetrable grid. The human as a social body stays steadily as the central topic of Lottje’s works. With the additionally displayed 2-canal video work “Jedes Zimmer hinter einer Tür” (“Each room behind a door”), Petra Lottje breaks through the congruence of identity by using the lip-synch technique to isolate the speakers’ voices as same as constructing new units. In 22 sequences she adapts the direct quote of movies and stages herself as a female main role. The actress is an Isomer of the role and the artist is an Isomer of the acting person. She creates a composition, with which she catches the potential time equivalence of diverse emotions of non-linear displayable states. As the videos are creating a subjective realm of experience, they throw the viewer back to himself and generate a reflection beyond the borders of the own existence.