# Madeleine Boschan

Madeleine Boschan (born 1979) is a German artist.

## Biography

Madeleine Boschan studied at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig from 2000 to 2006, where she was taught by John Armleder.
Since 2010 she has participated in numerous institutional exhibitions throughout Europe and North America focusing on: artistic strategies dealing with preconditioned role-models and relationships of people and architecture, as well as new tendencies of Abstract art, contemporary art from Berlin or Germany, and the interdisciplinary impact of the cabinet of curiosities on contemporary thinking, science and exhibition practice.
She lives and works in Berlin, Germany.

## Practice

Starting in 2008, Madeleine Boschan built her sculptures from found material. These first objets trouvés were modified, reassembled and brought into relation with each other by colour interventions. The different components lost their common value of utilization. With their machine-like appearance these sculptures seem to suggest expedience, still, they inhere in a kind of defunctionalised dissociation – as do indigenous fetishes or desolate and disused apparatus.
From her extensive occupation with Samuel Beckett's TV-pieces, such as "Quod I" and "Quod II", which he realized in 1981 for the German SDR, and his late "closed space stories" as "Worstward Ho" (1983) Madeleine Boschan has derived genuine poetics of space: Space 'itself' is empty and incomprehensible. It is for a body to appear within this void to designate it as a place, to grant contour, form, and shape to it, to constitute it as 'surrounding space'. According to Beckett, Boschan emphasises that spatial experience is first and foremost a physical experience: how does a body gain its halt and stand within the void, how does it find its appropriate place and holds up this position, how does it interact with other bodies?
In 2013 and 2014, she revised and reconsidered her primary pictorial vocabulary: standing, reclining, towering, tilting, arching as well as expansion, contraction, colour, form, measure, and positioning. For in a prudently arranged turn and, particularly, in contrast to the gestalt-like linearity of her prior works, she addresses herself to purely planar bodies; situated residing freely throughout the given space in utterly different phenomenal states; each for itself, yet, constantly in relation to each other. Furthermore, Madeleine Boschan has inseparably incorporated "Technicolor's" base colours (red, blue, green, yellow, magenta, cyan, + black and white) into her forms. Colour is, thus, not just appended or appliquéd to her sculptures; rather, the specific chromaticity, being an immediate part of the sculptural operation, originates its very own specific forms.
In the years following, a most elementary question, Roland Barthes' final enquiry constituted the basis of her practice: "How to live together?" As she herself stated: "The earlier sculptures were linear, for sure, intrinsic and averted, withdrawn from us. And after some years, I simply longed to make them more planar, to give them more surface, realign them towards the surrounding space and relate them closer to us. If you like as a broadside at the beholder. And honestly, to me they are still all the same. Not visually, of course, but they all pose the same existential question of spatial corporality, of how a body gains its own stand, finds its appropriate place and holds up this position."
After 2016, "pieces dwelling on the concept of 'spaces within space' and, at the same time, of passage or transition" emerge, "fictive and functionless artefacts" which "retain the utopian ideas that are contained in the architectural strategies she references": Brazilian Tropicália, Jorge Ben, Astrud Gilberto, and Oscar Niemeyer, or James Cameron's cinematic use of the L.A. River-bed, Blade Runner's electric billboards, the topic of a ruinous antiquity, and the pastel colours of 1980's Miami.
In 2018 and 2019, Madeleine Boschan boldly turned the negative void space of the open passages and walk-through situations of her previous portals into positive shapes or entities. The beholders are confronted with a new corporeality. Accordingly, the surrounding walls and spaces associate themselves with these planar objects, conveying both their given objecthood as well as their potential pictorialness.

## Solo exhibitions

2022
    Lying on stony ground the fragments, Kirche St. Getrud, Cologne
    it´s just a kiss away, Galerie Bernd Kugler, Innsbruck, Austria
2019
    In twilight these ridiculous and exquisite things descendingly move among the people, gently and imperishably, Sunday-S Gallery, Copenhagen, Denmark
    Tulips and chimneys, Galeria Maior, Palma de Mallorca, Spain
    the enormous room, Galerie Bernd Kugler, Innsbruck, Austria
2017
    BB 105/146, Galerie Lange und Pult, Zurich, Switzerland
    What lays bare in me, Collectors Agenda, Vienna, Austria
    Partance, Galerie Bernd Kugler, Innsbruck, Austria
2016
    in which its gaze, bent merely on itself, upholds and gleams, Hezi Cohen Gallery, Tel Aviv, Israel
2015
    Escapement (with Andy Hope 1930), Neue Galerie Gladbeck, Germany
    Galerie Bernd Kugler, Innsbruck
    or am I seduced by its ambient mauve, Herrenhaus Edenkoben, Germany
    what´s wrong with your eyes, Larry, Berlin, Germany
2014
    Technicolor: a) Feld, b) Fläche, Marburger Kunstverein, Marburg, Germany
    Capri, Vitamin, Reutlingen, Germany
    Deal with ´em, Jagla, Köln, Germany
2013
    Closed Space Stories, Hezi Cohen Gallery, Tel Aviv, Israel
    Don't you wonder sometimes 'bout sound and vision, Kunstverein Heppenheim, Heppenheim, Germany
    Say a body. Where none. Say a place. Where none. For the body. To be in., Kunstverein Ulm, Ulm, Germany
    Scope = immeasurable, Einraumhaus, Mannheim, Germany
    Anwesenheit unerreichbarer Bezugspunkte, Galerie Bernd Kugler, Innsbruck, Austria
2012
    An open Field, a Factory, a By-pass, Gloria, Berlin, Germany
2011
    Kayfabe, Galerie Bernd Kugler, Innsbruck, Austria
    RoidRage, Kwadrat, Berlin, Germany
    Niteflix, Autocenter, Berlin, Germany
2010
    Kalt, modern und teuer, Kwadrat, Berlin, Germany
    Cosmic Camping, Appartement, Berlin, Germany

## Group exhibitions

2020
    31:women. (Exhibition after Marcel Duchamp, 1943)., Daimler Art Collection, Berlin, Berlin
    Jubeljahr, Städtisches Museum Schloss Salder, Salzgitter Salzgitter
    Intermezzo, Galerie Bernd Kugler, Innsbruck, Austria Innsbruck
2019
    some trees, Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles, Los Angeles
    Comrades of time IV, Whatspace c/o Hardspace, Basel Basel
    Avanti, Michael Horbach Stiftung, Cologne Cologne
2018
    Junge Kunst / Junge Künstler, Skulpturenpark Heidelberg, Heidelberg
    Light in / as image, Daimler Art Collection Stuttgart-Möhringen [de]
2017
    Zehn Jahre Zürich, Galerie Lange + Pult, Zurich, Switzerland
    Lob des Schattens (Italienischer Raum), Marc Strauss Gallery New York City, US
    Modern sculpture, Galería Casado Santapau, Madrid, Spain
    Artists´Books for Everything, Weserburg | Museum für Moderne Kunst, Bremen
    Berlin-Klondyke, Umetnostna Galereija Maribor, Maribor, Slowenia
    Three, two, one, Abbot Kinney, Venice, US
    The Gift Collection, Galerie Bernd Kugler, Innsbruck, Austria
2016
    Enea, Jona, Switzerland
    Moby Dick Filets, Secession, Vienna, Austria
    Welt am Rand, Kunsthaus Erfurt
    bedsitter, Mirante, Vienna, Austria
    Still Still Life, Galerie Bernd Kugler, Innsbruck, Austria
2015
    Wo ist hier?# 2: Raum und Gegenwart, Kunstverein Reutlingen, Germany
    Enea, Jona, Switzerland
    18, Galerija Contra, Zagreb, Slovenia
    Vanitas extended, Stedelijk Museum, Ypres, Belgium
    Standard International – Post Spatial Devices No. II, Geisberg, Berlin, Germany
    Berliner Edition, Salon Dahlmann, Berlin, Germany
    Leipziger Edition, Kulturforum Altenkamp, Schloss Holte–Stukenbrock, Germany
    Caritatis, Semperdepot, Vienna, Austria
2014
    Luggage and observations, Galerie Klaus Gerrit Friese, Stuttgart, Germany
    Psycho Killer, qu'est-ce que c'est?, Galerie Börgmann, Mönchengladbach, Germany
    Present, Kunstraum Kreuzberg / Bethanien, Berlin, Germany
2013
    Publications, Galerie Bernd Kugler, Innsbruck, Austria
    Berlin Klondyke, Hipp Halle, Gmunden, Austria
    Novecento mai visto. Highlights from the Daimler Art Collection. From Albers to Warhol to now, Museo di Santa Giulia, Brescia, Italy
    The Legend of the Shelves, Autocenter, Berlin, Germany
2012
    Accelerating toward Apocalypse (Private / Corporate VII), Daimler Contemporary, Berlin, Germany
    Gare de l'Est, Esslinger Kunstverein, Villa Merkel, Esslingen, Germany
    En désordre, Philara – Sammlung zeitgenössischer Kunst, Düsseldorf, Germany
    Berlin Klondyke, Neuer Pfaffenhofener Kunstverein, Pfaffenhofen, Germany
    Gentle Giants II, Kwadrat, Berlin, Germany
    Abstract confusion, Kunsthalle Erfurt, Erfurt, Germany
    Status. Berlin (1), Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, Germany
    Black Oriental, Galerie Bernd Kugler, Innsbruck, Austria
    Eine Frau, ein Baum, eine Kuh, Museum für Konkrete Kunst Ingolstadt, Ingolstadt, Germany
2011
    Based in Berlin, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, Germany
    Berlin Klondyke, Art Center, Los Angeles, U.S.
    Synecdoche, Bourouina Gallery, Berlin, Germany
    Abstract confusion, Kunstverein Ulm, Ulm, Germany

## Private and public collections

* Daimler Art Collection, Stuttgart, Germany
* Philara – Sammlung zeitgenössischer Kunst, Düsseldorf, Germany