(Un)real

Art is not just about objects or phenomena. Art also represents something – even when it does not depict something we can recognise.

The exhibition (Un)real features interpretations by various artists of reality and of the notions we form in our encounter with works of art and reality.

The fulcrum of the exhibition comprises Ai Weiwei’s gigantic trees rising from the marble floor. The bare trees are not just trees. They are fragments of numerous dead camphor trees gathered in southern China and combined to create a new reality. Maybe it is a critical representation of how a multitude of individual parts are forced together and subjected to a system that attempts to look natural, but is actually a huge, controlled illusion. An unreal reality.

Or the German artist Gerhard Richter, whose work Strip reveals to us that an image is not merely an image; its nature is not static. If you get really close to his 10-metre-long strips, they flicker: in a moment you lose any sense of overview. But if you keep your distance, as we do when we need to understand something, that does not work either: all the details merge. You cannot actually see the picture – and that is what is all about. Really unreal.