MARKUS HUEMER
Ducks Do Not Freeze on Ice
11.06 – 31.07.2024.
An exhibition by Austrian artist Markus Huemer “Ducks Do Not Freeze on Ice” will open on Tuesday, June 11 at 7 PM at the X Vitamin Gallery, at Resavska 19 in Belgrade.
Markus Huemer was born in Linz in 1968, where he studied painting. He then attended the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and was appointed a fellow at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne. In addition, he studied art history, philosophy, and Latin philology. After teaching at Goethe University in Frankfurt, he became a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. He has exhibited in numerous internationally recognized institutions and galleries. He lives and works in Berlin.
In his long-standing artistic practice, he explores the peculiarities of perceiving artistic reality through a dynamic exchange of experiences in expanded and traditional media.
The exhibition at X Vitamin Gallery presents a series of paintings and drawings created during 2020 and 2021 in which Huemer addresses the motif of cryptogams – plants that reproduce via spores, such as lichens, mosses, ferns, seaweeds, fungi, viruses, and bacteria. These earliest forms of life on our planet are the only life forms that have not yet exited the evolutionary process, defying any climate change. Cryptogams are a kind of fundamental environment on our planet from which new, different life can always emerge.
The title of the exhibition underscores the fact that there are species with more perfect innate survival mechanisms than those possessed by the human species. This thought can be related to questioning the dominant role that humans play in shaping the planet. A new holistic understanding of the world, which involves the interdependence of all ecosystems, is essential for the preservation of the planet, the only living space we have at our disposal and which we are obliged to share with others.
Markus Huemer’s exhibition is supported by the Austrian Cultural Forum in Belgrade.
