In the Cabinet – Denise Werth

With the exhibition format ‘In the Cabinet’, the Kunsthalle Recklinghausen is launching a new series that will bring a work or group of works directly from an art academy to Recklinghausen twice a year. Once a year the academies open their studios for a few days and all the students, especially the graduating classes, present themselves to the public - usually a long-awaited date in the annual art calendar.
‘In the Cabinet’ at the Kunsthalle Recklinghausen will kick off with Denise Werth (*1988), who attracted a great deal of attention during the Düsseldorf Academy open studios from 16th to 20th February 2022 with her graduation under Prof. Thomas Scheibitz. A group of works from this room can now be seen in the Kunsthalle one week later.
What is remarkable about Denise Werth's works is the decoupling of the signified and the depicted. How are we as viewers supposed to deal with a sculpture like ‘Frauenstimmen im Weltall’ (2019) when we clearly think we are looking at an oversized pear? Or is it a carrier bag after all? A worthwhile look back at Surrealist strategies could shed light on this, because when René Magritte subtitled the picture of a pipe in 1928 with ‘This is not a pipe’, similar questions were already being asked, which were continued in semiotic debates in the conceptual art of the 1960s. However, Denise Werth's works also clearly differ from Surrealism and binary drawing theory, as her attributions of meaning to form and her symbolic impressions approach formal processes in unfamiliar ways. It is precisely the formal struggle for figuration and abstraction, which defines the work ‘Granate’ (2022), that also locates Denise Werth's works within the extended history of the beginnings of the Kunsthalle Recklinghausen. This wall piece, which constantly changes in terms of surface area and depth, looks at the old debate as to whether sculpture and painting still represent coherent categories from the rear-view mirror of a future art history. ‘Women's voices in space’, perhaps it all has more to do with Stanley Kubrick after all?