Charlotte Posenenske: Work in Progress

Was a german artist associated with the minimalist movement who predominately worked in sculpture, but also produced paintings and works on paper. Charlotte Posenenske was born in 1930 to a Jewish family. During the war, friends hid her from the Nazis; her father, however, committed suicide to avoid persecution. Shortly after the war she studied art under Willi Baumeister, who taught her about Modernism – which, of course, the Nazis had attempted to obliterate. She became particularly interested in painters who explored the spatial qualities of a pictorial surface, in particular Cézanne and early Mondrian. She travelled to the places where they had lived and made plein air paintings. Posenenske applied primary coloured sticky strips to paper, creasing them and then applying them in layers until shapes were built up – as in CMP 65 (1965) for example. She progressed to using sheet metal sprayed with monochrome paint which she then folded into sculptural shapes, and combined this with corrugated cardboard to produce the series ‘Vierkantrohre’ (Square Tubes, 1967) which look like ventilation shafts. She conceived these early sculptures as modules that could be adapted according to available space, each one assembled into a shape ultimately appropriate to the context it found itself in. Anonymity was important to Posenenske. Shifting between Minimal and Conceptual art, she viewed her function as that of a supplier who made material available, but who did not have to be present at the moment of artistic realisation – i.e. at the installation of the pieces in the exhibition space. Gradually Posenenske became increasingly indifferent as to whether or not her creations could be identified as art. She stopped working as an artist in 1968, no longer believing that art could influence social interaction or draw attention to social inequalities. Instead, she turned her attention to sociology until her death in 1985, becoming a specialist in employment and industrial working processes. She refused to visit any exhibitions during this period, or show her work. There have been a few posthumous exhibitions of her ‘Square Tubes’, mainly in galleries and public spaces. Only now, displayed in the context of her entire artistic output, does her significance to the history of Modernity become apparent. ‘I make series because I do not want to make individual pieces for individuals,in order to have elements combinable within a system,in order to make something that is repeatable, objective,and because it is economical.The series can be prototypes for mass-production.[…]They are less and less recognisable as “works of art.”The objects are intended to represent anything other than what they are. Poseneske stopped working as an artist in 1968, no longer believing that art could influence social interaction or draw attention to social inequalities. She retrained as a sociologist and became a specialist in employment and industrial working practices until her death in 1985. During this period of self-imposed exile Posenenske refused to visit any exhibitions, and did not show her work.

Hiuwai Chu es Responsable de Exposiciones y Conservadora del MACBA Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona desde 2021, donde ha trabajado desde 2007 como conservadora adjunta y onservadora. Ha comisariado exposiciones como Bouchra Khalili. Entre círculos y constelaciones (2023); Panorama 21. Apuntes para un incendio de los ojos (2019); Territorios indefinidos. Perspectivas sobre el llegado colonial (2019); o Akram Zaatari. Contra la fotografía. Historia anotada de la Arab Image Foundation (2017). Es coeditora del libro Climate: Our Right to Breath (K.Verlag, 2022). Participa en el matronato de Hangar, residencia artística y centro de investigación y producción y en el Comité asesor de Córdova, un proyecto curatorial independiente, los dos con sede en Barcelona. Fue miembro del Consejo editorial de L’Internationale Online de 2021 al 2023. Antes de trasladarse a Barcelona, Chu trabajó como editora asociada en Apeture, Nueva York. Estudió antropología en Barnard College, Columbia University.