DON´T TOUCH! Groupshow

12 March to 19 April 2025 ⟶ Galerie

Installation View Galerie Georg Nothelfer. Photo: Katrin Rother

Geerten Verheus, Venice in Fur (hooked), no. 1 and 2, 2010, Rubber and brass, each approx. 120 x 50 x 5 cm (variable). Photo: Katrin Rother

Installation View Galerie Georg Nothelfer. Photo: Katrin Rother

Jeroen Jacobs, Untitled, 2024, Concrete, steel, pigment, 105 x 50 x 50 cm

Jenny Michel
top left: Paradise-Vehicle #5 Satellite Kopie, 2014, Nitrofrottage on various papers and cardboard, wood, approx. 50 x 73 x 67 cm
bottom right: Paradise-Vehicles in Decay - Trailer I, 2014, Nitrofrottage on paper and cardboard, found wood, two parts, approx. 70 x 58 x 39 cm (variable). Photo: Katrin Rother

Jenny Michel, Paradise-Vehicles in Decay - Trailer I, 2014, Nitrofrottage on paper and cardboard, found wood, two parts, ca. 70 x 58 x 39 cm (variable). Photo: Katrin Rother

Jenny Michel, Paradise-Vehicle #5 Satellite Kopie, 2014, Nitrofrottage on various papers and cardboard, wood, approx. 50 x 73 x 67 cm

Installation View Galerie Georg Nothelfer. Photo: Katrin Rother

Stella Geppert, BROKEN CLOUD, from the series Two Feet Seven Inches, 2018, Performative sculpture, Clay unglazed, ca 65 x 90 x 75 cm

Thomas Rentmeister, Untitled, 2012, Mop, approx. 190 x 20 x 50 cm (detail). Photo: Tony Nathan

Installation View Galerie Georg Nothelfer. Photo: Katrin Rother

Thomas Rentmeister, Untitled, 2011, Styrofoam, Styrodur, adhesive tape, 30 x 50 x 40 cm

Installation View Galerie Georg Nothelfer. Photo: Katrin Rother

Birte Bosse, Die Sammlung, 2025, Steel, concrete, 78 x 64,5 x 55,5 cm

Bastian Hoffmann, Flatsix, 2019, Cast aluminium Porsche engine, 213 x 140 cm

HAUCK PLÜMPE, Konstellation, HP_M_041, HP_O_E_004, 2025, MDF, lacquer, ceramic, smock, approx. 160 x 75 x 32 cm. Photo: Katrin Rother

Installation View Galerie Georg Nothelfer. Photo: Katrin Rother

Installation view Galerie Georg Nothelfer. Photo: Katrin Rother

HAUCK PLÜMPE, HP_FM_TYP1_05, 2024, Box with handles / lacquered chipboard, 60 x 50 x 115 cm

Birte Bosse, Die Nase, 2024, Found object from ruins of GDR building (Hohenschönhausen), Steel, concrete, 69 x 36 x 25 cm

Installation view Galerie Georg Nothelfer. Photo: Katrin Rother

Robert Schad, Boden Bündel, 1985, square steel, approx. 47 x 73 x 82 cm

Geerten Verheus, The Limits of Almost (Slats), 2008, rubber and acrylic glass, 24 x 254 x 16 cm

Installation view Galerie Georg Nothelfer. Photo: Katrin Rother

Installation View wall works Galerie Georg Nothelfer. Photo: Katrin Rother

Jenny Michel, Hidden Encyclopedia, 2021, found materials on erased book pages on paper, 24 x 17 cm

Jenny Michel, Hidden encyclopedia future, 2022, Erased book pages on handmade paper, 30 x 20 cm

Jeroen Jacobs, Artifacts no.3, 2018, Concrete, 14 x 19 x 12 cm

Jeroen Jacobs, Glücksstein, 2020, Brick, concrete, 23 x 24 x 13cm

Thomas Rentmeister, Untitled, 2015, Metal ring, tape and charcoal on paper, 59.4 x 42 cm

Thomas Rentmeister, Eyelets snoozing on the edge, 2015, metal eyelets, 59.4 x 42 cm

HAUCK PLÜMPE, File 1 - 3, 2024, MDF lacquered, each 25.5 x 11 x 50 cm

Geerten Verheus, Doloröschen, 2016, acrylic on wool, 76 x 52 x 1 cm

Robert Schad, Untitled, 2012, Wax crayon on paper, 29,7 x 21 cm

Robert Schad, Untitled, 1988, Grease chalk on paper, 24,7 x 33 cm

Birte Bosse, Pleasure, 2025, Collage on MDF, 40 x 30 cm

Birte Bosse, Dreams, 2025, Collage on MDF, 40 x 30 cm

Birte Bosse, Health, 2025, Collage on MDF, 40 x 30 cm

Bastian Hoffmann, O.T., 2022, handmade paper, desk, chair, paper, pens, folder, cutting mat, ruler, Tesaroller, 22 x 29 cm

Delia Jürgens, Untitled (Glittering) + Untitled (Ahead), 2019-2021
Color on pigmented inkjet print of a deconstructed studio window generated by real-time algorithms interlaced with screenshot animation on PC on tracing paper on pigmented inkjet print of a deconstructed studio window generated by social media algorithms on paper on gesso on MDF, two parts, 46 x 22.5 cm each

Opening
Friday, March 7, 6 - 9 pm

Artist talk
Saturday, March 22, 2 pm

With the group exhibition D O N ´T T O U C H !, Galerie Georg Nothelfer raises questions about context and aesthetic experience of sculptural works.

Art is “framed” in its historical, social and political context and is rarely viewed in isolation from it today. The different contexts and the associated framing change perception. It is above all the information spaces in which art is accompanied by text. But it is not only the semantic context created by the provision of information about a work of art that influences the experience of art. It also reveals an intentional expression. In general, a work can be considered art if it addresses important issues or themes of its time or has cultural significance. Contextual information usually determines the aesthetic judgment compared to no information about the works and artists. It shapes neural responses from visual perception to social interaction.1 In recent years, increasing evidence suggests that context shapes not only our perception of the world, but also the way we interpret it - the same is true for art. The emotional relationship determines its critical consideration, although art always also has a fictional dimension and retains a supposedly ambiguous status in relation to the reality of life.

Art itself penetrates into non-artistic areas and finds other visual languages through an interest in new materials, right up to a changed understanding of art. At the latest since the transgressions of modernism and the associated detachment from the “old”, art itself has repeatedly redrawn the boundary between art and non-art, while at the same time proclaiming the abolition of this boundary and thus opening up new zones of experience. In this context, can the touching and, above all, the not touching of art be rethought in order to reflect on the contextual meaning?

Touch in the visual arts usually takes place on an emotional level, evoked through the contemplation and forms of perception, unless interaction with the work is intended: A “laboratory of the senses” is art, wrote Michel Serres2. For touch describes the relationship to things in life and in art. It thwarts the separation of the senses as well as that of subject and object. What remains is the sensual touch or visual “embrace”, which in the digital age is in turn given a new viewing and experience component via displays. Desire and thus the relationship between touching and not touching art has changed with and in the altered contexts - not only in public space.

The otherwise controversial question of touch arises less because here art can be heard and touched by everyone: The conditions and forms of reception familiar from museums and galleries change through strategies of “Entkunstung (de-artification)” 3 or deframing, in which the approach of art to things or staged actions that are not usually perceived as art, or even reframing, leads to objects from the non-art world being perceived as art through their transfer into the art context. This is what happened with appropriations and the well-known readymades: art was translated into other contexts of meaning - also due to a new, seemingly processual materiality of artworks made from everyday materials. The relationship between art and everyday life increasingly moved into the discourse on questions of autonomy, the sublime aura and the dissolution of ideal forms. Artless materials change the context.

The exhibition D O N ' T T O U C H ! stages this shift in aesthetic perception in the spatial environment as a down to the ground site and in this (perspectival) way also speculates on the various levels of the context, even beyond the art space and at the same time on the “invisible” artwork as an experience in non-artistic places: the information is rearranged as well as the contexts of meaning, which thus repeatedly emerge in a new form. Does this also mean a de-aestheticization of artistic forms? And does it answer the question of whether this is art here or elsewhere? At the same time, the exhibition speculates with “Leerstellen (interpretational gaps)” about the “reader-response-criticism” and the role of the viewer, not only in the context of space, but also of absence.

DO NOT TOUCH! Nevertheless, the general museum ban also applies to this exhibition. But the diversity of the works on display can illustrate the spiritual experience and how much art touches us without us touching it ...

(Text by Harald F. Theiss)

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1 Kohinoor M. Darda & Anjan Chatterjee, The impact of contextual information on aesthetic engagement of artwork, in scientific reports, März 2023

2 Berührung, Taktiles in Kunst und Theorie, Editors: Kristin Marek und Carolin Meister, Brill | Fink; 1. 2022 Edition

3 Theodor W. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, Frankfurt am Main 1970