Planet Venus in Full Daylight

Lothar Baumgarten

Jochen Lempert

Cathy Wilkes

Mara Wohnhaas

Richard Wright

Contrary to astronomers’ belief, sailors of old, who had a particularly well-trained eye, were able to see the planet Venus in broad daylight. This ability was famously described by the ethnologist Claude Lévi-Strauss in his treatise “Myth and Meaning” (1978). It prompts the question: What do we see beyond that which is shown?

The group exhibition Planet Venus In Full Daylight unfolds around the wall installation “Moskitos” (1969) and an 81-part slide projection (1968–1971) by the artist Lothar Baumgarten (b. 1948, d. 2018). These iconic works are shown alongside contributions by Jochen Lempert (b. 1958), Cathy Wilkes (b. 1966), Mara Wohnhaas (b. 1997) and Richard Wright (b. 1960). The starting point of the exhibition is the interplay between the unconscious and the conscious, between field research and intuition, between nature and culture.

As a result of numerous research trips, but also based on conceptions developed by other cultures, Lothar Baumgarten created a series of works in which he unmasked anthropological and ethnographic ‘facts’ as cultural constructions. Similarly, Jochen Lempert’s analogue black-and-white photographs bear witness to an analytical approach oscillating between scientific observation and pictorial poetry. Cathy Wilkes’s minimal gestures on canvas draw their sensuality from the attempt to depict liveliness: the everyday becomes a sign, a landscape. When seen individually, Richard Wright’s detailed gouache and gold leaf letters on the wall are reminiscent of the delicately decorated initials common to historical scripts. Only as a composite word do they become legible and interpretable. Graphic changes, such as the rotation of letters, expand the layers of possible meanings beyond the associative and the linguistic. Mara Wohnhaas’s sculpture considers the book as an object that is both a source and a repository of knowledge. But knowledge is only ever a model of reality. In medieval times, access to particularly sensitive content between the covers of a book was regulated by means of stylised straps and locks; today, diaries serve as safes for personal notes that are guarded like a treasure.

The minimal and concentrated selection of works takes its cue from Claude Lévi-Strauss’s reflections on ‘primitive’ versus ‘scientific thinking’ and deliberately embraces the mythological as a magnifying glass that brings the issues it addresses into focus.