"ATELIERS WERE NEVER CLOSED" - IN MAY: Rythm Rhymes Ritual

Peter Piek and Michael Goller kick off the “ateliers where never closed” series, in which the artists provide a close-up insight into their work.

LOCATION

Studio in Leipzig and Chemnitz

TIME

in May

RYTHM RHYMES RITUAL

Michael Goller describes the collaboration with his artist colleague Peter Piek as follows:

An exhibition is more than the sum of the exhibited pictures or objects, it seems that a new soulful being emerges from the synopsis, a new identity. That is something very exciting.

Something new that comes into the world and is allowed to come in a kind of dialogical experiment - especially when the idea of exploring the dialogical space in between is now also conceived interpersonally and, as here, is also divided between two locations.

The time was somehow ripe for this exhibition. After all, the dialog had already been going on for over a year through the joint work on an audio book for a jointly written book. In other words, dialog par excellence. And on the other hand through the individual, one could say - and especially in the current global situation now also more intuitively comprehensible for a general public - eremitic working method of the individual visual language positions. It could be very interesting for the viewer and listener to find out what has happened in the respective studio during this year of audio book recording. In my case, it is still happening, because the exhibited pictures are not yet finished, they have been growing patiently and sometimes impatiently for a year, experiencing all light and emotional situations as they develop. And yet they are finished in each individual, unintentionally formulated act of the process. I have embedded this in a ritual that carries the process, like a line of music carries a composition, and within whose “grammar” an unlimited freedom opens up and time seems to expand to a tiny point. It is like the water of a river that does not act, but changes. This river is the inner man. The inner man does not act. It changes. It flows. It does not change. He is. In every place at the same time. The banks, the reflections, the foliage, the stones change. The feeling of being a stranger on the outside. Strangeness as an encounter between the inside and the outside. The foreign as a reflection.

The inside is always new in its transformation and yet it is itself, never alien and at the same time everywhere, even in the apparent outside. My tool for making this transformation tangible: the ritual. The process of transformation remains organic in the flow of time. The choice of colors as if by chance. The situation, incessant new beginnings, constant openness and acceptance of what grows so that something becomes visible that can only become visible after months.

Of course, the ritual can also adapt if it threatens to lose its vitality after a while due to a change in external and internal conditions, even if it is only the different seasonal lengths of the day. These are decisions that affect the “grammar” and thus there is a rhythm. Ritual and rhythm, rhythm and ritual.

And the studio is the most authentic place imaginable for mediation, where the invisible is not lost. It enables the viewer to empathize directly with the ritual space, to immerse themselves in it and to experience something of the peace and happiness of the expansive horizon.

I saw Peter's installation at the beginning of April and was somehow touched by its aura. In conversation, it turned out that the elements of rhythm and ritual kept cropping up in order to get closer to the content. And then we had the idea of sharing and exploring this. From the starting point of the New World, it may be quite possible to open up the individual works, but also, of course, to board the “color spaceship” of the “New World” with a new perspective after visiting the studios via book or audio book.