Je n'ai rien à dire. Seulement à montrer.

Presstext Nina Köller for Galerie Katharina Bittel, Hamburg

In her second solo exhibition at Galerie Katharina Bittel, Natalie Czech is showing new works dedicated to various twentieth-century poems. The artist examines to what extent words evoke images, and how the perspective on what is depicted can be changed by minimal alterations to the text. The works on display scrutinize the potential of communicating one’s own perspective and of conceiving a given reality as capable of change. Czech’s works often draw on textual sources such as fragments of novels, film quotes, or diary entries.

The newly created series Hidden poems shows photographs whose material basis consists of magazines, newspapers, or illustrated books. In the visible sections of text, individual words have been highlighted using a pencil or marker pen. Read in sequence, the words form a poem that appears like a single thought, a snapshot of sorts, engaging in a dialogue with the remaining text and the adjacent illustrations.

In the work A hidden poem by E.E. Cummings #2, we see a detail from an American magazine from the 1960s. The sky is lit up in an unnatural pink color by a nuclear-bomb test. The text describes the great enthusiasm among the spectators over the unusual visual event. Individual words have been crossed out, resulting in the poem In sunlight over and overing. A once upon a time newspaper, which conveys the nostalgic image of an old newspaper fluttering in the sunlight, pointing up the uncritical reporting, inadequate by today’s standards. A poem about photography Rolf Dieter Brinkmann wrote in 1963, entitled Geschlossenes Bild (A hidden poem by Rolf Dieter Brinkmann), is embedded in an essay about ‘Appropriation Art,’ a strategy in art that critically examines concepts such as authenticity, objectivity, and authorship. The artists mentioned in the text, Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, and Richard Prince, have created photographs out of found aesthetic materials and consider copying such material to be the true artistic act. Czech escalates this method by reproducing the works once more in a different context. Additional works from the series examine the exhibition concept of the ‘White Cube,’ which calls for the presentation of works of art in neutral white spaces, an idea that came under heavy criticism in the 1960s from American artists such as Michael Asher. A hidden poem by Robert Lax accompanies the very personal narrative of a man who sailed from the US to Great Britain by himself; Robert Creeley’s poem can be found in a text about a solar eclipse; and another poem by E.E. Cummings can be read in a report about the mathematician John Nash.

The work Adieu ihr schönen Worte [Adieu, ye fair words] presented in the second room refers to a quotation from a volume of previously unpublished poems by Ingeborg Bachmann (1926–1973) whose content resembles notes in a diary. Adieu, ye fair words, with your promises. Why have you left me; were you ill at ease?
Beginning with this quote, Natalie Czech visualizes the idea, having a single oversized sheet of paper made out of all of Bachmann’s novels, stories, poems, and other writings published in German. The final result is a sole work of art in which, looking closely, we can still read isolated syllables. A single page lies on the floor, apparently torn from a notebook; it contains the quote in Bachmann’s hand. In Czech’s perspective on Ingeborg Bachmann, the poet’s authorship is opened up toward a level on which she quotes herself. Roland Barthes’ famous line about the death of the author and the gaze on the text as a collection of quotes attest to forever new combinations and arrangements.

By entitling her exhibition Je n’ai rien à dire. Seulement à montrer., a quote from the philosopher and literary critic Walter Benjamin, the artist gestures toward Benjamin’s method of composing various observations and ideas, trouvailles and fragments of modern life. In her works, Natalie Czech likewise creates new visibilities by eliding or highlighting individual words. But whereas Walter Benjamin sought to use the technique of montage to arrive at a more objective representation, the artist, by creating new levels of interpretation, engages the beholder’s subjective gaze.