August 03, 2023, 10 am – 2 pm
Many thanks to the artist Ben Cottrell for his lecture Mazy Corpus and discussing the works of our participants within the Studio Program at BAI | Berlin Artist Residency, Art School, Arts Incubator, and Live Online Courses & Classes.
“Mazy relates to the word mazey, which means dizzy, bewildering, or giddy. One might even go so far as to say delirious, suggesting the sensation of being in a labyrinth itself. A giddy body in a labyrinth, a delirious whirling, vertiginous body of work.
Artist Ben Cottrell will take us on a brisk, meandering journey through a number of key phases and mediums in his work: expansive installation, painting, drawing, and sculpture. We will take a glimpse of some of the recurring themes therein: the ambivalent relations of nature and culture, order and chaos, cliché and myth – ideas that will echo at our destination: the ‚Canvas’ series.
Viewing the ‚Canvas‘ series as a connective network, an image world, and an apparent archival cosmos, Cottrell will take this as our next point of departure to riff on a number of broader interweaving themes: the performative and archival, excess and restraint, the body and transformation. This series explores how layers and fragments of information interweave, generating a potential field of associations and imaginary cinematic narratives that relate to concepts of surface and depth, inside, outside, absence, presence, and their formal, psychological, and poetic connotations. How does this reflect and question our era of dizzying media and information excess? How do we navigate? What are the shifting dynamics of the work and the viewer? Is the labyrinth open, closed, or endlessly spiralling?” (Text by courtesy of Ben Cottrell)
Ben Cottrell, born in 1972 in Cornwall, England, lives and works in Berlin. He studied at Cheltenham School of Art and Design, was an artist in residence at, among other institutions, MuseumsQuartier, Vienna, and Meet Factory, Prague. He was also co-director of the Berlin based exhibition space forever and a day Büro. His works have been shown in venues including Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn; Galería Ehrhardt Flórez, Madrid; Lodger, Berlin; Cell Project Space, London; Envoy Enterprises, New York; Gallery Ben Kaufmann, Berlin; Gallery Mikael Andersen, Copenhagen; Garage Rotterdam; Ten Haaf Projects, Amsterdam; Blackbridge Offspace, Bejing; Kunst-Werke Berlin; Knust x Kunz, Munich; Superdeals, Brussels; Warhus Rittershaus, Cologne; Sauvage,Düsseldorf; Märkisches Museum, Witten.
More information on the Ben Cottrell Instagram Account.
