Hendrikje Kühne and Beat Klein

Hendrikje Kühne and Beat Klein began working together in the 90's. They have had residencies in Paris, London and Dublin and numerous exhibitions in the U.K. and Europe. Their exhibition in 'the gallery' at Grange House (Monday 25th November until Thursday 19th December 2003) had an accompanying 16pp colour catalogue

Many greetings from...
Postcard collage, 1999

In the city
Installation, drawings on board, 2000

Driving at night
Slide installation, 2001

Hendrikje Kühne was born in Darmstadt and attended the Basel School of Art in the 80's. She won the Basel Artists' Award in 1992. Beat Klein was born, in 1956, in Sorengo and attended the Zürich School of Art before joining the Sculpture Department of the Basel School of Art. He also won, in 1993, the Basel Artists' Award. They began working together in the 90's and both had a grant for the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris (1991) and residencies in London (1992-93) and on the Artists' Work Programme at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin in 1998. They are currently based in Switzerland

Their work has several recurring themes such as repetition of image, manipulation of scale, and an interest in extracting the very essence from an idea, often pre-conceived, and putting their own interpretation on the subsequent re-presentation of that idea in a visual way. For instance in their exhibition, in Dublin, entitled A World of Difference. For this work the artists created a self supporting cardboard framework on which they glued images culled from tourist brochures. No longer was the familiar map presented but a three-dimensional room installation was created with the amount of space for each country controlled by the amount of tourist images the artists could find. In other words Hendrikje Kühne and Beat Klein redefined the world. Each area was represented by how it was reproduced in tourist brochures; the glossy, officially-sanctioned, view of a place as seen (or as wished to be seen) by the potential visitors. Palm trees, palaces, pools as opposed to poverty, pollution and pain. The palliative view of travel, the ease of package holidays and the world according to Thomas Cook et al. A paradigm that, in fact, visually illustrated the factual inaccuracies

Also in the same year Hendrikje Kühne and Beat Klein applied their own stance to Driving at Night. In this work the artists were fascinated by the fact that when they drove at night they found ""there are many concealed entrances and turnoffs and when we drove into forest paths the headlights of our car only illuminated a fragment, a section of a hidden world. With the camera positioned between the headlights we took photographs of these situations"". And in an earlier work, entitled Many Greetings, the artists explained that they had taken ""a closer look at the big landscape picture so that countless landscape elements from postcards that were dissected become decernible. These elements like skies, mountains, meadows and trees were reassembled according to motifs and shades of colour. Together they formed a changing view which can never be fully focused. The second part of the work was made of the backs of postcards, showing the reverse. A composed collage of texts that defied decoding, since the texts were either fragmented or illegible, forming in their individuality a counterpart to the world of mass-produced images….."" (click on thumbnails above for larger images of both of these works)

Hendrikje Kühne and Beat Klein have had shows together at the Ikon Gallery (Touring Programme), Kunst Raum Riehen, Kunstverein Schwäbisch Hall, The Lowry, Kunstraum Aarau, Gasworks Gallery, Temple Bar Gallery, Städtische Galerie im Amstshimmel, and Galerie Staub in Zürich. They most recently were part of the 8th Baltic Triennial of International Art in Vilnius, Lithuania