Opening: 23 September 6pm – 9pm
Duration: September 24th – November 11th 2022
The gallery is closed from October 26th to October 29th.
Showroom
exhibition video
If you let the words space and notation work on you, you first think of space, maybe even the infinite world space and then of the attempt to note it down, to hold on to it, so to speak, the attempt to define space.
In fact, the term comes from New Music, the classical music of the post-war period. Back in the 50’s and 60’s, composers tried by all means to say goodbye to the pre-war traditions. German composers and artists in particular who had suffered from the trauma of “degenerate art” finally wanted to break out of the rigid academic conventions.
The space notation represents such an attempt. A classical sheet music consists of pitches, tone values, accidentals, etc., which are all neatly and clearly arranged in bars. His intention is to determine a piece as precisely as possible using these parameters in order to ensure the most accurate performance possible by the performer. Many composers felt this tight harness almost like a dictatorship inherent in the score, and so many experimented with a hybrid between free improvisation and the determination of at least a temporal or spatial sequence of events. This is where space notation comes into play: it defines a space with the help of certain signs and a timeline and gives the performer the freedom to play their sound within this time frame. Anyone who has seen such scores quickly realizes that they strongly resemble drawings or graphic paintings.
The painter Bernhard Paul is known for being inspired by works of new music and contemporary music. He has already created paintings based on compositions by Steve Reich, John Cage, Wolfgang von Schweinitz, Georg Friedrich Haas and many others. For the “space notation II” collection, he presents images from the “agens” and “prelude” series.
Text: Alexander F. Müller
