For three days in August 2022, the street artist Jim Avignon will show his collected stage designs from over 25 years of music performances for the first time in the exhibition space MaHalla, a three-phase power station in Oberschöneweide transformed into an art venue. Admission is free of charge.
Image above: courtesy Jim Avignon
For more than two decades, the painter and conceptual artist Jim Avignon has also been touring the world as a musician with his one-man band “Neoangin”, entertaining audiences sometimes in the most obscure locations with his very own version of Dada Pop. Equipped with colourful masks, signs and stage sets, his turbulent shows become little complete works of art that are certainly unique in this form. After the last encore, the works painted on paper are immediately taken down again, folded up and stowed away in a blue travel bag to be hung up again somewhere else at the next show.
Speed and simple backgrounds are the hallmarks of his painting, which never denies its roots in street art, although it is now also popular with established galleries. The works are painted with acrylic on paper, landscape format, mostly about 1.5 x 3.5m in size. They have a lot to tell – not only about our time and its absurdities, but their cracks and repairs also tell of their creator’s never-ending journey.
Jim Avignon’s perspective is always humorous and humanistic. In bright colours and with his contours and words borrowed from comics, he gets to the heart of things with a clear eye for grievances. Art is communication, according to one of his axioms. The tableaux accumulated over many years seem like anachronistic signs of life from the basement clubs of the world’s metropolises, in which the artist documents and satirically comments on the technical, interpersonal and political developments of the last two decades.
From 19 to 21 August 2022, Jim Avignon will now show a large selection of his – unsellable – stage designs for the first time for a weekend under the title “Small World Big Cities” in the new, increasingly revitalising cultural location of Berlin-Oberschöneweide.
The MaHalla exhibition space is a 2021 project initiated by film director Ralf Schmerberg in the spirit of Berlin’s post-reunification artistic free spaces with the aim of transforming Germany’s first three-phase turbine showroom from 1905 into an innovative cultural project.
Visitors can look forward to an entertaining art programme this weekend and, at the end of the event, try their luck at the auction of a painting that has been painted live beforehand.
WHEN?
Vernissage:
Friday, 19.08.2022, 6:00 p.m. – 10:00 p.m., with music, the artist will be present.
Exhibition period:
Saturday, 20.08.2022, noon – 8 p.m.
at 5:00 pm: Musical tour with Jim Avignon
Sunday, 21.08.2022, noon – 6 p.m.
at 2:00 p.m.: Live painting with auction (5:00 p.m.)
COSTS?
Admission free
WHERE?
MaHalla, Wilhelminenhofstraße 76/Tor 1a
12459 Berlin-Oberschöneweide
Directions: S-Bhf Schöneweide, Tram 60, 67: Firlstraße
