Thing 1, Thing 2
Josep Maynou
Opening November 17, 19-22
Finissage November 25 19-22
Nov 18 – 25, 10-19h
Büro BDP, Mareschstrasse 1, 12055, Berlin
www.brokendimanche.eu
The second exhibition and book in the series a book, a room is by Josep Maynou. Taking the idea that a physical room and a paginated book can reflect and expand on each other as locations for storytelling, the series is logically enhanced by Maynou’s inclusion. As an artist who marries narrative scenarios to everything from sculptures, installations and furniture design the book here becomes a distillation of something akin to prompt cards for the artist’s own performative storytelling.
Maynou’s exhibitions are full of the familiar, the functional even, the go-ahead-take-a-seat kind. For this exhibition the narrative prompts collected and collated in the book spill over and find articulation the environment the artist has created in the gallery space. One enters the space and it feels relaxed, a domestic setting: Maynou transposes the commonplaceness of a couch say, or a fridge and intersperses among them his signature brocaded Morroccan rugs, lamps he has fashioned himself, posters for possible movies yet to be made. In between are a myriad of artefacts and assembles, from ashtrays to joint holders and objets trouvé, all are full of the artist's anecdotes and tales. The space of the page as much as the gallery is home to these stories.
Josep Maynou (born 1980 Barcelona) is a Berlin / Barcelona / Morocco based artist working in drawing, sculptural assemblage, textile, video, and performance. His multidisciplinary approach comes together as a form of contemporary storytelling that situates itself beyond the traditional art formats, often leading to installations in contexts such as TV repair shops, private apartments, abandoned spaces, laundromats or second-hand stores. He studied Fine Arts at UB (Barcelona), Facultade de Belas Artes Porto (Porto) and Middlesex University (London). His work has been shown internationally, including at University of Oxford (UK), PS122 (NYC), with Beverly’s at the Material art fair (Mexico City), Bombon Projects and Fundació Antoni Tàpies (Barcelona), Le Commun( Geneve), Lehmann and Silva (Porto), Galerie Suvi Lehtinen, and Transmediale (Berlin), and recently in ‘Pane per Poveri’ a collaborative project that ran during the opening of the Venice Biennial (Venice, Istanbul, Athens).
The series a book, a room, is conceived and curated by John Holten as several solo exhibitions or interventions in our gallery space at Büro BDP, with each having an accompanying publication. The first in the series was 'like biting into sugarcane' by Simon Speiser in May 2017. The intention and aspiration is to give artists and writers the chance to place within both gallery and paginated spaces their work, and to explore the possibilities for narrative, storytelling and text within a visual, performative or otherwise physical practice; or indeed, for writers, to flip this and ask vice versa: how can writers extend literature into space?