The Night Eats All Objects | 26 April - 15 June 2024

Hua International is pleased to announce the forthcoming exhibition, "The Night Eats All Objects," an ever evolving experiment salon initiated by German-born and Berlin-based artist Lea von Wintzingerode, which weaves together poetry, sound, social sculpture and parallel projects. Von Wintzingerode has designed this exhibition to extend her view that painting and sound art are fundamentally social practices. A series of listening sessions and gatherings will foster interaction and discourse with viewers. Collaborating artists: Paul DD Smith will contribute paintings and etchings, Adrijana Gvozdenović will contribute research-based works, and Filipe Lippe, also known as Mr. Cosmic Slop, will share an archive of Afrodiasporic radical music positions and disruptive sound experiments from yesterday to beyond.

Central to the presentation is a new large-scale painting by von Wintzingerode, “the arrangement” (2024) depicting two figures, derived from an unknown source photo from the 1920s of two cabaret performers, posing within boxes that in the painting resemble both concrete plinths and theatrical stages. The painting explores themes of memory, representation, and the uncanny, blending historical inquiry with contemporary critique. Accompanying the painting is a sound installation titled "polyvalent desires 2” (2024), featuring a composition by von Wintzingerode herself. This installation fills the space with layered sounds while colored lights transform the room's atmosphere, and graffiti, based on a fragment of a French poem spray-painted in Paris in 1976, adorns the walls, adding a textual depth to the visual and auditory experience.

Lea von Wintzingerode presents a new series of collages and paintings that continue her exploration of challenging conventional art roles. As the initiator of this collaborative endeavor, von Wintzingerode invites fellow artists to join her in a collective and sensual inquiry into sensibility, emphasizing the role of participation and imagination in redefining artistic perspectives. This collaboration aims to push the boundaries of traditional art forms and create a dynamic interplay of creative expressions.

Her artworks serve as critical sites for alternative modes of desire, enabling viewers to see beyond the present’s complexities with an open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and multiplicities of meaning. Significantly, von Wintzingerode’s method involves painting from memorized photographs and research material, underscoring the mediated and fallible nature of memory. This approach not only acknowledges the “open work” of her paintings but also involves the viewer in the creative process, inviting them to complete the narrative. "The Night Eats All Objects" transcends traditional exhibition formats, redefining it as a platform for exploring the social dimensions of art and fostering community dialogue. It challenges the boundaries between audience and artist and delves into the potential of art as a communal and dialogic medium.

The exhibition further explores the concept put forth by Marcel Duchamp of the “infinitude” and which the infinite is a lens for intro-spective, retrospective and prospective understanding, situating von Wintzingerode’s work within a broader context of cultural productions including fashion, music, and poetry.

Details in the artworks, like the barely visible hats worn by the painted figures, symbolize the absorption and dispersion of fashion elements into a broader narrative, emphasizing the elusiveness of memory and the symbolic significance of unconventional spaces. These spaces, akin to those encountered in dreams, serve as stand-ins for the flux of images and ideas that populate our subconscious.

Adrijana Gvozdenovic (b.1986) lives and works in Berlin, is a Montenegro- born artist whose practice develops in the fields of visual art, performance and artistic research. She sees art-making as a way to create new forms of mutual engagement, often producing works as conversational tools or for collective study. Between 2017 and 2020, she was an associate at the research centers a.pass and the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, focusing on "Archiving artistic anxieties". This period influenced her creation of hybrid works that blend emotional and affective aspects of knowledge production, such as the card reading performance "7 anxieties and the world". Her work has been shown at nGbk (Berlin), kaaistudios (Brussels), tranzit (Bratislava), Whitechapel Gallery (London),Glasmoog (Köln), MuHKA (Antwerp), Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein (Vaduz), and at the 54th October Salon (Belgrade). Her texts have been published in books: "In these circumstances: On collaboration, performativity, self-organization and transdisciplinarity in research-based practices," Philippine Hoegen & Lilia Mestre (eds.), Onomatopoeia 181. 2022., “The Artist Job Description,” Vijai Patchineelam (ed.), Track Report (Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp), Track Report, Antwerp. 2021, “Strange Attractors,” Nomadum Rosa Masilela (ed.), KUNST-WERKE BERLIN e. V. 2018. X Berlin Biennale.

Filipe Lippe (b. 1986) lives and works in Berlin and is an artist and researcher from Duque de Caixas, Brazil, whose work spans various media and disciplines, including drawing, academic research, lecturing, and writing. He is pursuing a PhD in art theory at HFBK Hamburg, focusing on the interplay of historical trauma, racial identity, and late-colonialism within the context of neoliberalism.

Paul DD Smith (b. 1983), lives and works in Berlin, is a British-born artist who works in sculpture, painting, and graphic works that use figuration and ornamentation to convey themes of myth and deep human history. His art delves into handcraft techniques like ceramics, silk painting, embroidery, and printmaking, traditionally seen as part of the feminine domestic sphere, to challenge gendered aesthetics and the construction of binaries. Doing this, Smith is interested in how aesthetics become gendered and how binaries are constructed, whilst in his artistic explorations concepts of bodies, creatures and environments are profoundly entangled and impossible to isolate. Notable exhibitions include solo presentations at The Left Place, Reims, 2024; (solo) 1646, The Hague, 2023; (solo), and group exhibitions Stroboskop, Warsaw, 2021; Kunstverein Springhornhof, Neuenkirchen (2022); Kinderhook and Caracas, Berlin (2020/21); Zarinbal Khoshbakt, Cologne (2020); Chert Lüdde, Berlin (2019); Philip Haverkampf Galerie (2018); He curated the group exhibition Flow My Tears Christopher Tracey at ACUD Gallery, Berlin in 2020.

Lea von Wintzingerode (b. 1990) lives and works in Berlin, is a German-born artist who works across diverse practices including sound and painting. She studied at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Vienna from 2010 to 2012 and completed her education at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Hamburg under Jutta Koether from 2012 to 2016. She received the Bayerischer Kunstförderpreis für Bildende Künste in 2020 and the Marianne-Defet-Malerei-Stipendium in 2014. She has had solo exhibitions, The End of an Eye, at Jacky Strenz, Frankfurt/Main (2022) Overground, at Brunand Brunand, Berlin (2022) notes on radical love, at Oldenburger Kunstverein (2022) The Contract, Lulu, Mexico City (2019) and been shown at Zil, Zil, Zil, Centro Municipal de Artes Hélio Oiticica, Rio de Janeiro (2021) Tops der Fläche (Lecture), Dortmunder Kunstverein (2019) City Prince/sses (c: Hugo Vitrani and Chris Sharp), Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2019) The Shelter Hidden in the Eyes, Performance, (with Filipe Lippe), Deichtorhallen (2019)