Mirko Schallenberg
Mirko Schallenberg's paintings are modern still lifes. At first glance, the artist's keen sense for textures and well-balanced compositions, as well as materiality and spatiality, is apparent. He paints objects from his own extensive collection of materials and composes them in a new context. The beginning of his process includes the creation of sketches and a three-dimensional model. The purpose of the model is only to be used as an inspiration for the final pictorial vision and is not intended to be painted as a realistic interpretation. The painting style is however realistic, and Mirko Schallenberg places his objects as protagonists in a deliberate interaction with meticulous, impressive care. The very aesthetically and skillfully arranged everyday objects are executed in powerful and textural haptics and interact with each other. It is a constructive, metaphysical style of painting that deals with the mysteries of our reality.
Born in Northeim
Studies at Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Braunschweig
Foundation of Art Group "Konvention"
Degree in Fine Arts
Master Student of Prof. Hermann Albert
Scholarship at Artist Residency Meinersen
Founding of the Produzentengalerie Konvention, Berlin
Founding of the Kunstvereins Blauer Salon e.V., Berlin
Teaching assignment at the Akademie für Malerei, Berlin
lives and works in Berlin
„Dingfest“, Gallery Friedmann-Hahn, Ed. Art In Flow Publishing Company, Berlin
„still in motion“, Ed. Gallery Friedmann-Hahn, Berlin
"Nachglühen", Kunstverein Wasserburg, Bodensee
"Brutstätte", Galerie Cyprian Brenner, Schwäbisch-Hall
„Geometrie des Zufalls“, GALERIE VON&VON, Nurnberg
„Kunstessenzen XXVIII“, Galerie Friedmann-Hahn, Berlin
„Stillleben“, Galerie Peters-Barenbrock, Ahrenshoop
„Werkschau #2“, Galerie Z22, Berlin
„Nexus“, Gallery Friedmann-Hahn, Berlin
Gallery Barbara von Stechow, Frankfurt/Main
„Berliner Realismus“, Gallery Cyprian Brenner, Schwäbisch Hall
„Mit dem zweiten Blick“, Gallery Lauth, Ludwigshafen
„Nexus“, GALERIE VON&VON, Nuremberg
Art Karlsruhe, Gallery Friedmann-Hahn
Hallescher Kunstverein, Halle
Art Karlsruhe, Gallery Friedmann-Hahn
Artgeschoss, International Art Exhibition, Braunschweig
Kunstmuseum Bad Frankenhausen
„Lauf der Dinge“, Gallery Meier, Freiburg
„Dingfest machen“, Emslandmuseum, Sögel
„Geometrie der Dinge“, Art Society Kirchzarten
State Gallery Petershagen
„Otto Dix aus der Privatsammlung Gunzenhauser und großformatige Malerei aus Berlin“, Stadtgalerie Altötting, Leipzig & Munich
Gallery Meier, Freiburg
„Das Leben der Dinge“, Gotisches Haus, Berlin
Gallery Artforum, Hannover
„still in motion“, Gallery Schmalfuss, Marburg
„Das Leben der Dinge“, Gallery Open, Berlin
„Kubus“, Gallery von Zufall und vom Glück, Hannover
Kunstmesse Karlsruhe, Gallery Artforum
Kunstverein Blauer Salon, Berlin
Gallery Artforum, Hannover
Art Fair Karlsruhe, Gallery Artforum
„Resonanz“, with Kathrin Rank, Richard-Haizmann-Museum, Niebüll
"Zweistimmig", with Edite Grinberga, Galerie von Stechow, Frankfurt
"Entre Nous" with Kathrin Rank, Galerie ARTAe, Leipzig
„In Bloom“, Galerie Barbara von Stechow, Frankfurt
„Totentanz und Glück“ with Max Kaminski, Galerie Cyprian Brenner, Hüttlingen-Niederalfing
Kunst Zürich, with Barbara von Stechow, Switzerland
„Deacde“, Galerie VON&VON, Nuremberg
„PRIVATE CHOICE“, Galerie Friedmann-Hahn, Berlin
„Bildergeschichten“, Städtische Galerie Bad Reichenhall
„15 Jahre Galerie Friedmann-Hahn“, Galerie Friedmann-Hahn, Berlin
„schwarze Kohle, rothe Erde, gelbe Flammen“, Galerie Villa Novilla, Berlin
„tierisch gut“, Gallery Root, Berlin
„Accrochage“, Gallery Falkenberg, Hannover
„Komplizen“, Gallery Falkenberg, Hannover
„Kunstessenzen“, Gallery Friedmann-Hahn, Berlin
„11 in 4“, GALERIE VON&VON, Nuremberg
„Double Act“, Gallery Brötzinger Art, Pforzheim (with Kathrin Rank)
„Best of I & II“, Gallery Cyprian Brenner, Schwäbisch Hall und Hüttlingen-Niederalfingen
„Still alive“, Gallery Schmalfuss, Berlin
Gallery Lauth, Ludwigshafen
Art.Fair, GALERIE VON&VON, Cologne
„Malverwandtschaften“ Art Historical Museum, Stralsund
Gallery Friedmann-Hahn, Berlin
„Lauf der Dinge“, Gallery Meier, Freiburg
„Kerngebiete“, Gallery Schmalfuss, Marburg
„Beziehungsweise“, Art Society Heidenheim
Gallery Schmalfuss, Berlin
„Behausung“, VBK, Berlin
State Gallery Petershagen
„PArt3“, Petershagen
„Behausung“, VBK, Berlin
„Wenn die Malerei den Dingen lauscht“, Kunstverein Schöningen
„Von Dingen und Räumen“, Kunstverein Herrenhaus Heinrichsruh
Gallery Töplitz, Werder
Art Society Freiburg
Losito Award, Großes Waisenhaus zu Potsdam
Gallery Friedmann-Hahn, Berlin
„Z50“, Hotes-International Fine-Art, Project space, Freies Museum Berlin
Art Society Aschau
Gallery Schmalfuss, Marburg
„still in motion“, Gallery Friedmann-Hahn, Berlin
Gallery Friedmann-Hahn, Berlin
„still in motion“, Galerie Friedmann-Hahn, Berlin
Künstlerhaus Meinersen
Objection to the first impression
23.04.2019
Apples, feathers, glasses, branches, a brick, jugs, rulers, here a dandelion, there a knife - arranged into assemblages and compositions. At first glance, Mirko Schallenberg's works seem quite familiar: still lifes, after all. But if you dare to take a second look, you are filled with uncertainty. And it is enigmatically beautiful!
"I want you to be able to trust your eyes, to trust your senses, even your own subconscious." When a painter says something like that, it's an invitation to first look at his works with an open mind - and not to immediately search for layers of meaning or quotations.
Schallenberg's paintings gather found objects. Everyday things. In other words, objects that one has oneself in the household, or that are at least within reach. Glasses, wooden plates, jugs, apples, birch branches. The objects appear almost remote in the interpretive horizon of our modern world of digital artifacts. Painted in rich detail and with an application of paint that not only creates coloration, but also models the surface of the canvas sometimes rough or even sublime. Art can hardly be more representational.
Like a kind of curator, the artist collects things and keeps them in a magazine in his studio, which sprawls across a Berlin industrial floor. Where industrial production pulsated, combinations of simple things now become pictures. Piece by piece, Schallenberg arranges the objects, tries out constellations, discards and decides.
How the rooms come into being
The objects, the things are there. What Schallenberg then creates are first of all spaces. A cardboard box, a wooden crate, two mirrors, a whitewashed wall. Backdrops? Not quite, because the rooms themselves enter into action with the things. There is a color palette leaning against a wall or catching the shadow cast by a moth. Then comes the next creative moment: Schallenberg does not simply stack the objects - but brings them into relationship with each other. Wooden plates balance on clay jugs, which in turn become the location for glasses or further jugs, a branch rests against a book, or a string lowers an apple into the half of the picture.
Not least because of the fruit involved, a genre classification imposes itself on the viewer: still life. In other words, paintings that radiate unambiguity and are a guarantee of reliability and stability. The objects literally rest - and yet bear witness to transience. Every blossom, no matter how beautiful, will wither, every apple rots with time. As absurd as it sounds, where something is still, its transience becomes all the more apparent.
Breaking out of the genre
Unsuspicious. Quiet. Perhaps it is these attributions that have caused still life to be almost forgotten by contemporary art in recent decades. To put it bluntly, one could say: the still life has gone quiet. But Mirko Schallenberg's still lifes do not make it that easy. They simply do not adhere to genre-appropriate agreements, they simply do not fulfill the hasty still life expectation. For on closer inspection they reveal cracks, tend to instability. There's a clay jug about to crack. The strawberry is no longer lying on the wooden board, but is already half falling. The candle wick still gives off some smoke, but is already almost cold.
What at first glance seems so dormant and solidly attached, is to be seen quite differently. The works do not show any fixed situations at all, which are exposed to the ravages of time. They show nothing but moments and situations that can hardly be thought more transient: From one moment to the next they could be different. A log tilts and causes a glass to fall. The structure? Completely overturned. From one moment to the next. It's a game of stability and instability, of the uncertain and the familiar.
No false promises
But this uncertainty is not enough. For Schallenberg intensifies his play with time and the moment even further. Branches bear buds, juicy green, dry leaves and bare branches at the same time - only a few centimeters away, all seasons take place on the canvas. Emergence, becoming, passing away: simultaneously. But as absurd as it sounds, such a synchronous diachrony does not unsettle, but rather ensures humility: there is, after all, a course of events that cannot be stopped. All life will die one day.
For me, the appeal of Mirko Schallenberg's art is that it is highly realistic. Not only artistically with their representationalism and masterful execution; but also conceptually: because they take the vanitas motif, i.e. the reminder of the transience of existence, to extremes. Moments mingle with circles of life. Schallenberg's still lifes need no false bottoms or complicated contortions. They settle on clarity: not only life is transient. Every moment is.
The still life in the 21st century
Dr. Harry Lehmann, philosopher
22.11.2017
Things gain - in a very specific constellation to be found - a voice themselves: In the age of virtual, simulable worlds, objects finally lose their sensual presence. They become abstract signs in those technicized living spaces in which man ekes out an existence today. The enlargement of the objects increases their dignity. The contrast of object and background heightens the sensual presence of their otherwise inconspicuous surfaces. And the matte hue, which lies equally on all color surfaces, allows the things to come to rest, as if eternal peace lies over them.
Darkened against any artificial light that may penetrate from our living world, the objects in the picture begin to shimmer in their own light. Schallenberg's paintings explore a very old philosophical question, the question of being. And like ancient philosophy, these paintings seem to respond to an experience of loss, to the loss of the magical world in which things spoke vividly to people, as they say. In this respect, this painting belongs to a tradition of cultural criticism that runs through the entire intellectual history of ancient Europe. However, measured against the claim of contemporary art, this would be too little; too much this painting repeated in a series of uniform pictures the mantra of forgetfulness of being.
Yet the painted image does not reproduce reality as it is, but rather highlights it in precisely this particular aspect, and this idea is also served by the enlargement technique, the background design, and the coloring of the paintings, in other words, everything that establishes this idiosyncratic art.