Location
Brunnenstr. 22, 10119 Berlin

Dates
July 20 – August 20, 2023

 

We’re pleased to present Heat, a solo exhibition of new paintings by David Benedikt Wirth. This marks the artist’s first exhibition with Super Super Markt and his first in Berlin.

In his artistic practice, the artist refers to his own image archive to explore themes of society and culture, looking specifically at the relationship between human beings and their environment. In the 7 paintings presented at Super Super Markt, we see how both of these forces are brought together, and how they are conflicted in their own way.

David Benedikt Wirth looks at subjects that at first glance spark a series of emotions and narratives. In homo, which stems from an ongoing series of the same title, Wirth depicts a desert-coloured handgun in its 1:1 scale. The work is a continuation of his exploration into how an object can trigger feelings by its mere appearance. The hunter and hunted. In present and heat, we see a Leopard captured by an infrared camera in its ghostlike presence, prowling through the city of Mumbai. Referenced from a nature documentary, the Leopard is captured sensually drinking with its tongue hanging out, lapping up the water, while simultaneously looking at the viewer.

A handgun, a Leopard caught glancing at us, a shipwreck underwater: Wirth’s attentive, meticulous and naturalistic type of painting plays with layers that convey a sense of temporality as well as liveliness. It is the sensuality of the image and the surface that is key to his practice and we observe this duality coming to life in these new works.

In the painting of the goddess Sekhmet, the object in its natural copper oxidised pigment is monumentalized, blown up in scale from its miniature origins. Similar to triade, where we see an ancient amulet from 2000 BC depicting the gods Isis, Horus and Nephthys, the figures are brought to life and are yet immortalised forever by the heat used to glaze the ceramic.

Heat in a sense is both the underlying term and idea that connects all the works in the exhibition. For Wirth, his paintings are questions ready to be answered, each painted subject laden with interpretive meanings ready to be deciphered.