Introduction
A white book page as a new beginning, a white dove as a symbol of peace, Buddhist monks wearing white for mourning. Purity, innocence, infinity, perfection, silence, emptiness, coolness. Hardly any colour has as much meaning as the colour white.
Blanc de Blancs - wine connoisseurs use it to describe a white wine made exclusively from white grapes. But Blanc de Blancs also means the variety of meanings of this colour.
The exhibition Schnee fällt hinterm Berge (Snow Falls Behind the Mountain), curated by the Berlin artist Gregor Hildebrandt in Copenhagen, serves as the starting point for this exhibition and has been supplemented by several positions for Villa Schöningen. From March 19 to June 5 2022, Villa Schöningen will be showing 54 works by 38 contemporary artists, including Ann Veronica Janssens, Isa Melsheimer and Karin Sander. As different as the works are, they all share a formal criterion: their engagement with the colour white. With an achromatic colour that can mean not only reduction but also diversity.
Karin Sander, for example, sends a round canvas primed in white from exhibition to exhibition completely unpacked. The resulting patina, scuffs, scratches and supposed damage create a drawing, a record of the postal journey, a record of time. Her work starts as a blank, undescribed sheet and takes on a participatory form.
Another form of documentation of place and time is found in the work The Sum of All Best Practices by Jorinde Voigt. Here, the monochrome white allows lines, cut edges and shapes to emerge, capturing specific forms at a specific place, at a specific time. In this work, they are leaves that the artist collected on the way to her studio in autumn 2021.
Jürgen Krause applies chalk ground to both sides of a piece of paper with a brush. The mantra-like repetition of this action gives rise to a block-like object several centimetres thick, a condensation of many possible images. Only the title Priming. May to September 2012 suggests a beginning and an end, even if the plot can be thought of as infinite.
Thus Villa Schöningen begins its exhibition year with a white page. Just how powerful this can be was recently demonstrated by the arrest of a young Russian woman who was demonstrating against her country's invasion of Ukraine. She expressed her protest with a white poster without writing or symbols. This was enough of a provocation for the Russian authorities to arrest her.