The title of Marijn van Kreij’s exhibition at KLEMM’S—Abstraction, Class, Education, Hacking, History, Information, Nature, Production, Property, Representation, Revolt, State, Subject, Surplus, Vector, World, Writings—bears repeating, not to map it onto the show or suss out connections to McKenzie Wark’s A Hacker Manifesto (2004), from which the slew of weighty words is lifted, but rather to broach the artist’s relationship to language. Framing his show with this alphabetical list of nouns is a gesture indicative of the relationship between van Kreij’s work and the written word: it’s porous, entangled. And language is a focal point of the show, as found phrases crop up in many of the collages and drawings in gouache and pencil on paper or book pages exhibited here, appearing as comics, captions or in meme-ish juxtapositions of text and image. The selection of 28 drawings on view stretch from 2021 as far back as 2006, comprising a group van Kreij gathered intuitively. He anticipated the productive friction in staging this encounter between works which he has returned to sporadically over the years—mostly at in between moments, struck by the urge to simply make something. Previously situated as punctuation marks of sorts to his exhibitions, here the drawings are accentuated in turn by mobiles crafted from found materials. These wind chime assemblages introduce sound—or at least, its possibility—into the exhibition. (…)“ – Camila McHugh

On view until FEB 25, 2022.

Read the full press release here.

Marijn van Kreij, 2022; Klemm’s, Berlin
Marijn van Kreij, 2022; Klemm’s, Berlin
Marijn van Kreij, 2022; Klemm’s, Berlin
Marijn van Kreij, 2022; Klemm’s, Berlin
Marijn van Kreij, 2022; Klemm’s, Berlin