Bockspringen

Galerie Gilla Lörcher | Contemporary Art is very pleased to present the solo exhibition “Bockspringen” (leapfrog) by Iris Musolf.
In the exhibition the artist shows her recently created sculptures which appear quite harmless as well as some Pop inspired collages. Iris Musolf, already well known for questioning the structures of our supposedly free and transparent society, also puts her finger in the wound in “leapfrog”: “Which human developments and symptoms can be read on the surface of things : the shape, material, quality and quantity of available consumer goods? What abysses, for example, are hidden behind an air-filled cover of a toy? ”Iris Musolf lets us freeze to death on closer inspection.
Iris Musolf about her work: “Sex sells. That is the justification for everything. Every industry is a sex industry, ”as Laurie Penny put it. My obsession is with banal advertising and disposable items that tell of a world in which optimized surfaces, superficial fun, non-binding sex and colorful pictures set the tone. I am looking for material that can be a form for a gloomy premonition, the symptom of which is the physicality of man. I watch it become more and more a commercial resource and an industrial means of production. The human being as a whole disappears. It is broken down into data, affiliations, bust sizes, likes and performance.
I understand the sex industry as an exaggerated expression of subjecting even the most intimate desires and most vulnerable human areas to optimized control that is placed at the service of algorithms and controllable production processes. During this time, the human peculiarities and differences disappear, they are hidden or, conversely, worshiped and celebrated. Fantasies are played down and infantilized into stylized picture surfaces or brightly colored toys, while on the other hand their extremes become more and more unusual and cruel. What's going on?

Iris Musolf, born. 1980 in Hanover. She lives and works in Berlin. The artist studied from 2002 to 2009 at the University of Fine Arts Braunschweig with Bogomir Ecker and Candice Breitz (Meisterschülerin, master class student) and obtained a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Fine Arts Braunschweig. In 2005 she received the Erasmus scholarship for fine arts (Nice, France), in 2008 the scholarship Intensive Program AKI / ArtEZ, Enschede (Holland) and was nominated in 2011 for the Karl Schmitt-Rottluff scholarship, nominated in 2012 for the Young Academy of Fine Arts and nominated for the Sprengel Prize in 2014. In 2016 she received the 1st prize in the art-in-building competition of the Federal Office for Radiation Protection (Salzgitter).
Her work has been presented in numerous galleries and institutions in Germany and abroad, including in (selection):
Kunstverein Mannheim, Städtische Galerie (Viersen); Neue Galerie Landshut; Goethe Institut (New York City, USA); Konsumverein Braunschweig; International Video Art Festival (Amsterdam and Starnmeer, Netherlands); Biennale for Young Art Moskau (Tsaritsino Museum Moskau, Russia); Biennale Mulhouse (France); Art Labor Gallery (Shanghai, China);
Galerie Anita Beckers (Frankfurt a.M.); Galerie Perpetuel (Frankfurt a.M.); Galerie Manzara (Istanbul, Turkey) and Galerie Gilla Lörcher I Contemporary Art (Berlin).