Artspace Aotearoa will present a two-person exhibition showcasing the work of seminal German artist Charlotte Posenenske (1930–1985) and leading Aotearoa artist Peter Robinson. Coupled together here to examine how each artist establishes grammars of expression by testing out systems of assembly, seriality, and repetition, Priorities: Charlotte Posenenske and Peter Robinson will showcase each artist’s proficiency to push at the intrinsic nature of space and its undeniably social potential.
Presented in dialogue here, the presentation at Artspace Aotearoa examines the process through which their respective work asks fundamental questions of us as an audience: what are the rules of engagement here? How do we relate to one another? Do we want to participate in this? What happens next? Expanding on this, both artists have necessarily wrestled with the legitimacy of art and the artworld as a territory where change can happen. Spanning sculpture, painting, film, and archival documentation, in this exhibition we encounter an arc of contemporary sculptural practice that calls up its very emergence as a Western construct in mid 20th-century Europe to our present-day Aotearoa.
In this artworld-in-the-world we are invited to consider our bodies in relation to edges, where one thing ends and another begins. This activates the spatio-political quality of time with both artists tapping into this ambiguity: time as a monetizable measure, as an expressive singularity, as a language. This exhibition dives into form: waka, or tongues, or chimneys, or motorways, as well as the labour that it takes to produce all of this—our world in which we live together.
Priorities: Charlotte Posenenske and Peter Robinson
Artspace Aotearoa
10 February – 6 April 2024