Introduction

Johnen Galerie presents the new project A Bird in the Bush by David Hahlbrock in the courtyard. A Bird in the Bush is conceived as an interference of classical exhibition and outdoor intervention. The individual installations are related to the courtyard of the gallery complex, which the artist understands as a space between white cube and urban space. Five works are installed on several levels in the typical Berlin backyard, which extends from the cobblestones and facades to the roof. The arrangement opens up views and situations that refer to everyday urban structures - architecture and its inhabitants - and questions and opens up habitual patterns of thought with humour and poetics. The works address both the rigid spatial divisions of the buildings as well as the dynamics of traffic and the life of animals and plants in the metropolitan landscape.

The title of the exhibition and the triangular arrangement of the words 'a bird in the bush' are a classic example of selective perception and stand as an example of the artist's preference for cognitive experiments and a playful and questionable approach to perception.

In the rear part of the courtyard the artist has installed Vibration 1 (2010), a site-specific garden of potted plants. As soon as the S-Bahn passes by on the east-west track behind the courtyard, the vibration of the train is electronically amplified and transmitted to the plant boxes, which then vibrate. The work Watch out! (2010) resembles the numerous gutters in the yard. The periscope directs the view over the railway line. Architectural details can be seen in the eyepiece: a window corner, wall, a joint and a color stain. The picture is regularly interrupted by the trains crossing the axis of vision, whose movement dissolves the picture into abstract, dynamic color games. In the leaves of a tree hangs the golden Miesendach (titmouse roof) (2007/2010), which protects a food dumpling from the rain. It attracts with the shine of the gold and the food and is fixed to the tree with a chain as an open version of the golden cage. It remains to be seen which birds it attracts during the exhibition. For Sing me a song (2009) a branch fork was mounted on a house wall. The back part of the branch is made of bird food. We sleep while you're awake, we're awake while you sleep (2010) is a duplex house for birds and bats. It is installed on the roof and thus intervenes as an unusual object in the roof landscape of antennas and chimneys. 

David Hahlbrock, born 1980 in Koblenz, studied at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne and lives and works in Cologne and Berlin.