26.09.2013–31.08.2014
Ring Gallery

Max Schaffer
Enlightenment Strikes Back

In September 2013 the Berlin based artist Max Schaffer created a new work especially designed for the Ring Gallery at the Künstlerhaus.

Opening: September 25, 2013, 7 p.m.

In his work, Enlightenment Strikes Back, designed for the Ring Gallery in the Künstlerhaus / Salzburger Kunstverein, Max Schaffer deals with subjective readabilities and transformative potentials of language in relation to the mental and physical perception of spatial structures, as he has in some of his previous work.

Using interviews and texts about Salzburger Kunstverein exhibits that the artist did not see, he constructed a new web of referential set pieces through semantic shifts and analyses. With the translation in his handwriting, Max Schaffer adopts formulations and views of the exhibitions/works described and confronts them in written images reminiscent of formulas and cursory notes with the architecture of the building in which they took place. In the process, sentence formations emerge that deal with their fragmentary character and therefore provoke misinterpretations and misunderstandings. Visual, linguistic, and situational empty spaces and interruptions are often the focus of his work and open up associative spaces that demand a supplementary interpretation in the knowledge of ignorance.

For Max Schaffer, finding a visual form also means reactivating and categorizing thought or the reformulation of a pre-existing condition. By combining different temporalities, he creates a new temporary simultaneity and sketches a partially fictional, partially factual psychogram of the exhibition space.

Max Schaffer, born 1985 in Santiago de Chile, lives and works in Berlin. www.maxschaffer.de