Madeleine Boschan

Madeleine Boschan (born 1979) is a German artist.

Madeleine Boschan studied at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig from 2000 to 2006, where she was taught by John Armleder.

Since 2010 she has participated in numerous institutional exhibitions throughout Europe and North America focusing on: artistic strategies dealing with preconditioned role-models and relationships of people and architecture,^[1] as well as new tendencies of Abstract art,^[2] contemporary art from Berlin or Germany,^[3] and the interdisciplinary impact of the cabinet of curiosities on contemporary thinking, science and exhibition practice.^[4]

She lives and works in Berlin, Germany.

Starting in 2008, Madeleine Boschan built her sculptures from found material. These first objets trouvés were modified, reassembled and brought into relation with each other by colour interventions.^[5] The different components lost their common value of utilization. With their machine-like appearance these sculptures seem to suggest expedience, still, they inhere in a kind of defunctionalised dissociation – as do indigenous fetishes or desolate and disused apparatus.^[6]

From her extensive occupation with Samuel Beckett's TV-pieces, such as "Quod I" and "Quod II", which he realized in 1981 for the German SDR, and his late "closed space stories" as "Worstward Ho" (1983) Madeleine Boschan has derived genuine poetics of space: Space 'itself' is empty and incomprehensible. It is for a body to appear within this void to designate it as a place, to grant contour, form, and shape to it, to constitute it as 'surrounding space'. According to Beckett, Boschan emphasises that spatial experience is first and foremost a physical experience: how does a body gain its halt and stand within the void, how does it find its appropriate place and holds up this position, how does it interact with other bodies?^[7]

In 2013 and 2014, she revised and reconsidered her primary pictorial vocabulary: standing, reclining, towering, tilting, arching as well as expansion, contraction, colour, form, measure, and positioning. For in a prudently arranged turn and, particularly, in contrast to the gestalt-like linearity of her prior works, she addresses herself to purely planar bodies; situated residing freely throughout the given space in utterly different phenomenal states; each for itself, yet, constantly in relation to each other.^[8] Furthermore, Madeleine Boschan has inseparably incorporated "Technicolor's" base colours (red, blue, green, yellow, magenta, cyan, + black and white) into her forms. Colour is, thus, not just appended or appliquéd to her sculptures; rather, the specific chromaticity, being an immediate part of the sculptural operation, originates its very own specific forms.^[8]

In the years following, a most elementary question, Roland Barthes' final enquiry constituted the basis of her practice: "How to live together?" As she herself stated: "The earlier sculptures were linear, for sure, intrinsic and averted, withdrawn from us. And after some years, I simply longed to make them more planar, to give them more surface, realign them towards the surrounding space and relate them closer to us. If you like as a broadside at the beholder. And honestly, to me they are still all the same. Not visually, of course, but they all pose the same existential question of spatial corporality, of how a body gains its own stand, finds its appropriate place and holds up this position."^[9]

After 2016, "pieces dwelling on the concept of 'spaces within space' and, at the same time, of passage or transition"^[9] emerge, "fictive and functionless artefacts" which "retain the utopian ideas that are contained in the architectural strategies she references":^[10] Brazilian Tropicália, Jorge Ben, Astrud Gilberto, and Oscar Niemeyer, or James Cameron's cinematic use of the L.A. River-bed, Blade Runner's electric billboards, the topic of a ruinous antiquity, and the pastel colours of 1980's Miami.^[9]

In 2018 and 2019, Madeleine Boschan boldly turned the negative void space of the open passages and walk-through situations of her previous portals into positive shapes or entities. The beholders are confronted with a new corporeality. Accordingly, the surrounding walls and spaces associate themselves with these planar objects, conveying both their given objecthood as well as their potential pictorialness.

2022

Lying on stony ground the fragments, Kirche St. Getrud, Cologne

it´s just a kiss away, Galerie Bernd Kugler, Innsbruck, Austria

2019

In twilight these ridiculous and exquisite things descendingly move among the people, gently and imperishably, Sunday-S Gallery, Copenhagen, Denmark

Tulips and chimneys, Galeria Maior, Palma de Mallorca, Spain

the enormous room, Galerie Bernd Kugler, Innsbruck, Austria

2017

BB 105/146, Galerie Lange und Pult, Zurich, Switzerland

What lays bare in me, Collectors Agenda, Vienna, Austria

Partance, Galerie Bernd Kugler, Innsbruck, Austria

2016

in which its gaze, bent merely on itself, upholds and gleams, Hezi Cohen Gallery, Tel Aviv, Israel

2015

Escapement (with Andy Hope 1930), Neue Galerie Gladbeck, Germany

Galerie Bernd Kugler, Innsbruck

or am I seduced by its ambient mauve, Herrenhaus Edenkoben, Germany

what´s wrong with your eyes, Larry, Berlin, Germany

2014

Technicolor: a) Feld, b) Fläche, Marburger Kunstverein, Marburg, Germany

Capri, Vitamin, Reutlingen, Germany

Deal with ´em, Jagla, Köln, Germany

2013

Closed Space Stories, Hezi Cohen Gallery, Tel Aviv, Israel

Don't you wonder sometimes 'bout sound and vision, Kunstverein Heppenheim, Heppenheim, Germany

Say a body. Where none. Say a place. Where none. For the body. To be in., Kunstverein Ulm, Ulm, Germany

Scope = immeasurable, Einraumhaus, Mannheim, Germany

Anwesenheit unerreichbarer Bezugspunkte, Galerie Bernd Kugler, Innsbruck, Austria

2012

An open Field, a Factory, a By-pass, Gloria, Berlin, Germany

2011

Kayfabe, Galerie Bernd Kugler, Innsbruck, Austria

RoidRage, Kwadrat, Berlin, Germany

Niteflix, Autocenter, Berlin, Germany

2010

Kalt, modern und teuer, Kwadrat, Berlin, Germany

Cosmic Camping, Appartement, Berlin, Germany

2020

31:women. (Exhibition after Marcel Duchamp, 1943)., Daimler Art Collection, Berlin, Berlin

Jubeljahr, Städtisches Museum Schloss Salder, Salzgitter Salzgitter

Intermezzo, Galerie Bernd Kugler, Innsbruck, Austria Innsbruck

2019

some trees, Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles, Los Angeles

Comrades of time IV, Whatspace c/o Hardspace, Basel Basel

Avanti, Michael Horbach Stiftung, Cologne Cologne

2018

Junge Kunst / Junge Künstler, Skulpturenpark Heidelberg, Heidelberg

Light in / as image, Daimler Art Collection Stuttgart-Möhringen [de]

2017

Zehn Jahre Zürich, Galerie Lange + Pult, Zurich, Switzerland

Lob des Schattens (Italienischer Raum), Marc Strauss Gallery New York City, US

Modern sculpture, Galería Casado Santapau, Madrid, Spain

Artists´Books for Everything, Weserburg | Museum für Moderne Kunst, Bremen

Berlin-Klondyke, Umetnostna Galereija Maribor, Maribor, Slowenia

Three, two, one, Abbot Kinney, Venice, US

The Gift Collection, Galerie Bernd Kugler, Innsbruck, Austria

2016

Enea, Jona, Switzerland

Moby Dick Filets, Secession, Vienna, Austria

Welt am Rand, Kunsthaus Erfurt

bedsitter, Mirante, Vienna, Austria

Still Still Life, Galerie Bernd Kugler, Innsbruck, Austria

2015

Wo ist hier?# 2: Raum und Gegenwart, Kunstverein Reutlingen, Germany

Enea, Jona, Switzerland

18, Galerija Contra, Zagreb, Slovenia

Vanitas extended, Stedelijk Museum, Ypres, Belgium

Standard International – Post Spatial Devices No. II, Geisberg, Berlin, Germany

Berliner Edition, Salon Dahlmann, Berlin, Germany

Leipziger Edition, Kulturforum Altenkamp, Schloss Holte–Stukenbrock, Germany

Caritatis, Semperdepot, Vienna, Austria

2014

Luggage and observations, Galerie Klaus Gerrit Friese, Stuttgart, Germany

Psycho Killer, qu'est-ce que c'est?, Galerie Börgmann, Mönchengladbach, Germany

Present, Kunstraum Kreuzberg / Bethanien, Berlin, Germany

2013

Publications, Galerie Bernd Kugler, Innsbruck, Austria

Berlin Klondyke, Hipp Halle, Gmunden, Austria

Novecento mai visto. Highlights from the Daimler Art Collection. From Albers to Warhol to now, Museo di Santa Giulia, Brescia, Italy

The Legend of the Shelves, Autocenter, Berlin, Germany

2012

Accelerating toward Apocalypse (Private / Corporate VII), Daimler Contemporary, Berlin, Germany

Gare de l'Est, Esslinger Kunstverein, Villa Merkel, Esslingen, Germany

En désordre, Philara – Sammlung zeitgenössischer Kunst, Düsseldorf, Germany

Berlin Klondyke, Neuer Pfaffenhofener Kunstverein, Pfaffenhofen, Germany

Gentle Giants II, Kwadrat, Berlin, Germany

Abstract confusion, Kunsthalle Erfurt, Erfurt, Germany

Status. Berlin (1), Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, Germany

Black Oriental, Galerie Bernd Kugler, Innsbruck, Austria

Eine Frau, ein Baum, eine Kuh, Museum für Konkrete Kunst Ingolstadt, Ingolstadt, Germany

2011

Based in Berlin, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, Germany

Berlin Klondyke, Art Center, Los Angeles, U.S.

Synecdoche, Bourouina Gallery, Berlin, Germany

Abstract confusion, Kunstverein Ulm, Ulm, Germany

• Daimler Art Collection, Stuttgart, Germany
• Philara – Sammlung zeitgenössischer Kunst, Düsseldorf, Germany

• Official website
• Galerie Bernd Kugler, Innsbruck, Austria
• Hezi Cohen Gallery, Tel Aviv, Israel