The exhibition presents sculptures demonstrating the injection of an illusionary moment into objects from everyday life, which is characteristic of Rösel’s work. These objects are historical furniture pieces that have become obsolete through technological progress. However, Rösel gives them a new life in his art.

Rebuilding TV cabinets from the 1950s and 1960s which display the names Titian, Rembrandt and Leonardo, Rösel presents the TV programmes in a sublime wrapping. Instead of tube-operated black and white images they now accommodate video projections of a wasp flying in a toy helicopter as well as short films of the artist seemingly overcoming gravity. 

Two telephone benches of identical construction are endowed with two Berlin telephone directories from 1941 and respectively 1945. “The extent of horror inherent in the difference of these two directories reveals itself little by little. Rösel’s ensemble speaks quietly and laconically of the connection between the bourgeois and the barbaric.“ *

The installation lending its title to the exhibition I promise... is a collection of 27 money notes from Zimbabwe which work to highlight a hyperinflation of astonishing proportions illustrated by the notes which range from 1 to 1 trillion Zimbabwean dollars. Upon each note Rösel has painted two small figures performing somersaults around the image of a cliff which is imprinted upon each of the 27 notes. In addition to the original painted money notes, Rösel exhibits thumb cinema animation of the tireless somersaulting figures upon a monitor.

The work 100y presents the thematic entanglement of the past and present. 900 light bulbs of the GDR brand Narva packed in their original boxes are to be used as ready-mades in one single fitting, illuminated individually until their demise and replaced one after another until all 900 have been fully used. “Illuminants as timekeepers: The bulbs, each with a burning time of 1000 hours, will defy the EU-ban for a total of 100 years. This period of time seems to be clear-cut but it cannot really be grasped as its potential options and hazards are far beyond the powers of our imagination. However, if one thinks of the moment in which 100y will extinguish, one’s mind will begin to buzz like a helicopter on a wasp-flight.–€*

*Karsten  Müller

The book “Tizian, Rembrandt, Leonardo-s Automatic–€, ed. by Karsten Müller, Ernst Barlach Haus, Hamburg 2010, is accompanying the exhibition.