Samuel Beckett / Marin Karmitz | Comédie
18th January – 26th February 2005, Tuesday – Saturday, 11 a.m – 6 p.m

We are delighted to be able to announce our forthcoming exhibitions. From 15th January 2005 carlier | gebauer is showing recent works by Luc Tuymans, entitled Les Cinq Anneaux, and the 1966 film version of Samuel Beckett’s play Comédie (the French title of the play and the film) directed by Marin Karmitz in cooperation with Samuel Beckett.
Luc Tuymans is one of the most important and influential painters of his generation. He developed his painterly position in the mid-1980s. In an era that cast doubt on the possibilities of representation, he unwaveringly continued with figurative painting. Today he integrates the doubt into his artistic strategy and explores thematic, painterly and moral boundaries. His motifs relate to political and historical events, realizing the unpaintable in the process of considering these. Alongside these images one finds banal motifs from everyday life, biology and medicine, observations of details and excerpts. Tuymans takes as his starting point photos, reproductions in newspapers, film and TV images. His painting imitates the often faded, aged hues and the specific quality of these sources. Tuymans links an interest in second-degree depiction with the question of the various possibilities offered by the image and above all the issue of the information and truth it comprises. The unspeakable and the unpaintable are reflected uncompromisingly in his works. Tuymans adopts a distanced and sceptical position vis-à-vis the capacity and failure of images and asks the viewer what remains of the flood of images of the 20th and 21st centuries. carlier | gebauer is showing Les Cinq Anneaux (The Five Rings) in Arch 52.
At the same time we have succeeded in showing a further major 20th-century work addressing scepticism about images and language, the film Comédie, produced by Samuel Beckett in conjunction with Marin Karmitz. French director Marin Karmitz has made a name for himself, for example, as the producer of the films “Three Colours: Blue / White / Red”. Karmitz showed the world premiere of Comédie at the Film Biennale in Venice in 1966, together with Samuel Beckett. The 19-minute black and white film depicts three figures, two women (W1 and W2) and a man (M1), who busy themselves with the banal speech acts of a love triangle. Their bodies are contained in urns set next to each other in a black endless room; only their heads are visible. Their faces are covered in white make-up, they all wear the same wigs and are expressionless as they speak. Their language is a staccato utterance, incomprehensible even if one speaks French and a spotlight directs who may speak by illuminating the person’s face. Comédie is not a film version of a play and yet it remains entirely uncinematic: it does without action, cinematography, dramaturgy. The content remains concealed and compels the viewer above all to look. The sentences, which could still be perceived as “all-over”, were treated by the GMR (Groupe de Recherche Musicales, Paris) to remove the echoes and pauses. The ensuing concentration on the “optical experience” (Beckett), on rapid cuts, zooms, and light-dark contrasts, make Comédie a masterpiece of modernity. Its radical staging meant it was far ahead of its time, and perhaps even of our time. Comédie can be seen at carlier | gebauer in Arch 51.

For detailed press information and photos please contact us by phone +49 (0) 30 280 81 10.