Fenster is an exhibition unfolding over eight venues across Cologne and Düsseldorf. The show encompasses a range of practices that intersect with ideas of spectatorship, voyeurism, consumerism and their relationship to the body as a site of exhibition.

Fatima Hellberg is Artistic Director of Künstlerhaus Stuttgart and Steven Cairns is Curator of Artists' Film and Moving Image at the Institute of Contemporary Arts London.

Since the early 1980s’ Eva Löfdahl’s practice and sculptural work, has moved between the surreal, the anthropomorphic and the highly formal, presenting a careful exploration of the relationship between space, body and object. The skeletal legs severed from the knees down that comprise Telluric Touch (2015) are formed from wood chips. Suspended in a step-like motion, the sculpture suggests the figure through its conspicuous absence from the knee up. Other earlier works like 3D ‘Pi’ (Standing) (2009) echo both the Greek mathematical symbol and a small white plaster toadstool. Both humorous and unusually tactile, its proportions suggest a childlike playfulness, coupled with an absolute attention to form, proportion and feel of the object and the presence it commands.

Issy Wood’s paintings are drawn from various sources to comprise uneasy and often humorous compositions. Oak! Bluff! Plural! (2019) sees a boy with puffed cheeks intently blowing into a candy-coloured miniature house as if it were a trumpet. This subtle play on scale reversing the proportions of the child to the house. Two puppies playing form the subject of her oil on velvet work Misconduct/puppies (2018). Here the velvet ground suggests playfulness and warmth of subject on the painting surface. While the former are lighthearted in their pictorial narrative, works such as Hands (hate to break it to you) (2018) suggest a darker edge. Multiple hands reach out across the painting towards an eyeless face in a surrealist montage of symbolism. Eva Löfdahl and Issy Wood’s presentation at Galerie Kadel Willborn is part of Fenster, an exhibition unfolding over nine venues across Cologne and Düsseldorf, with work by Zoe Barcza, Rachal Bradley, Linda Christanell, Hildegarde Duane, Christian Flamm, Eva Löfdahl, Soshiro Matsubara, David Medalla, Zbigniew Rybczyński, Alan Stanners and Issy Wood, forming an interconnected dialogue across both cities. Fenster draws together practices that intersect with ideas of spectatorship, voyeurism, consumerism and their relationship to the body as a site of exhibition - strands and ways of seeing that loop back in the individual works and their interrelationships.