We are very excited to announce the opening of a group exhibition in Berlin’s Art Cru Gallery! Along with a selection of artists working at St Hedwig hospital in Berlin, five artists working in Project Ability’s ReConnect studios have had their work selected to be part of this exhibition titled ‘A Dream – What Else’. Congratulations to Angela McLauchlin, Alan Straiton, Simon McAuley, Grant Glennie and Richard Anderson.
You can read the Press Release below…..
Gallery ART CRU Berlin presents paintings from the intercultural exhibition project between Offenes Atelier St. Hedwig, Berlin and Project Ability, Glasgow. What is dream – what is reality? At what point do both levels blend into each other? In art, dreams and realities can merge together.
After an exhibition of artworks from Offenes Atelier St. Hedwig in the gallery rooms of Project Ability in Glasgow in the summer of 2018, the St. Hedwig Hospital invites the Scottish colleagues to a joint exhibition “A DREAM – WHAT ELSE” in Berlin. All involved artists are addressing this topic. “Dreams can sometimes lead us to the truth, but can also turn out to be deceptive. They can help us forget reality but also seduce us to ignore it. Are dreams more beautiful or cruel than reality and reality more truthful than a dream? Those are the questions we are asking in this exhibition” explains Paula Schmidt-Dudek, director of Offenes Ateliers St. Hedwig.
A total of 12 artists can be seen in the show. Glasgow’s list of participants begins with Richard Anderson, who works with geometrical natural forms using etching technique. Grant Glennie shows digital prints: black snowballs made out of fabric slightly falling apart. Simon Mcauly is present with blurry and resolving landscape photography, alongside Angela Mclauchlin’s dreams of fiber pens reminiscent of classic Art Brut and the horizontal and vertical tilled snowfalls of Alan Straiton.
From Berlin you will see the surrealistic pictures of R. Fecit, who lets a train drive through the sea, while Dirk Kühnel, among other things, depicts the dreamer himself. Robert Latka presents generously painted female figures, as if from another world. Yoshe Malkus’ works provide expressive and technically variable insights into the artist’s perception, which seems to allow us to share his nightmares. The pencil drawings by Violetta Volk, populated with dancing faun-like figures, carry us into a midsummer night’s dream with a hypnotic effect. Nina Valeska Witzel presents works in which she composes personalities from different periods on top of each other, as if drawn with a rainbow pen. The group from Offenes Atelier is completed with Belhe Zaimoglu, who effectively transfers her enigmatic figures to the interior of the body against a monochrome background – in picturesque day and night dreams.
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Galerie ART CRU Berlin is Berlin’s only gallery for so-called Outsider Art since 2008. The term (introduced in 1945 by painter Jean Dubuffet as “Art Brut”) refers to art by people with psychiatric disorders or mental disabilities. We are convinced that the particular perceptions these artists have allow them to create art of high authenticity. With our exhibitions we present works by “outsiders” as a crucial part of contemporary art and aim to foster discourse within the established art world. Being located at the Kunsthof on Oranienburger Straße, the gallery presents works by people with disabilities right in the centre of Berlin’s art scene. Galerie ART CRU Berlin is backed by the non-profit federation PS-Art e.V. Berlin – a network of different institutions.
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We are very proud to be part of this exhibition at the prestigious Art Cru Gallery. We’d like to thank Alexandra von Gersdorff-Bultmann, the director of Art Cru – along with all of the artists working at St Hedwig and especially Mechthild Niemann-Mirmehdi and Paula Schmidt-Dudek for inviting us to share the gallery with them!
You can read more about how we first came to know St Hedwig here….
Alan Straiton 
Angela McLauchlin
Grant Glennie 
Richard Anderson
Simon McAuley
