Evol
Vernissage |10|04|19 19 Uhr
EVOL deals with architecture as a metaphor for the state of society. His series of "Plattenbauten" ("prefabricated buildings") serves as a symbol of a failed political and social utopia. Like small memorials of the big brothers pushed to the edge of the city, they are reinstalled in the collective memory of the refurbished inner cities. Like parasites, they seize familiar and ordinary structures and situations. These take on a different meaning in the urban environment due to the minimal interventions.
Evol has been carrying out his interventions and installations for almost 15 years, not only in Germany but also in England, Norway, the USA, Russia and France, for example at the invitation of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, and also in China, where in 2010 he was the first of six artists to perform in the German Pavilion at the World Exposition in Shanghai. We are therefore delighted to welcome Evol with his exhibition It is what it isn't and it isn't what it is to the zone contemporaine.
After the reunification of Germany, the architecture of prefabricated buildings was hailed as an unwelcome legacy of socialist ideology, a problematic testimony to mass architecture, and an inhumane form of housing. Evol attempts to commemorate these housing machines, with their post-Soviet, brutalistic and monumental appeal, in every corner of Berlin. He works with found objects from the public space, junction boxes, used building materials, concrete bollards, which he gives a new meaning through simple interventions. In his site-specific installations at non-locations, the artist draws the viewer's attention to the strict geometric form of the prefabricated architecture and, at the same time, to the many small details that bear witness to life in these buildings, such as parabolic antennas, decorative curtains, and air conditioning systems.
He transforms the banalities of everyday life by adding colour to architectures of a completely different scale. Thus he paints over the base of a technical apparatus that no longer exists with the façade of an utterly insignificant residential building from the era of mass housing, without subjecting the old block to prior cleaning. Dirt, damage, traces of use make up the individuality of the everyday, become a special feature, allow inner voyages of discovery into the history of place and object. The flaws of the old become the beauty spot of the new.
His quiet works do not cry out for attention, but when you discover them in the streets of Berlin, they are like a knowing wink.