YOGAEva Berendes |
We cordially invite you to the opening of Eva Berendes' solo exhibition YOGA on Thursday, September 3, 2026 at 6 pm at B-Part Exhibition. The exhibition was developed as part of the annual cooperation with the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, supported by the Else-Heiliger-Fonds (EHF 2010).
In YOGA, Eva Berendes presents new works from a series of the same name: freestanding textile bodies over which yoga mats are draped, or from which they emerge. On the walls, plaster reliefs with openings appear as reduced interventions. Materials, colours and arrangements unfold their pictorial qualities between construction, adaptation and improvised assemblage.
The fabric screens address questions of abstract painting: colour, support and surface are extended into space. Colour appears as a textile covering whose seams – turned visibly outward – expose the logic of its own making. As in many of her works, the artist pays particular attention in this new series to the relationship between front and back. She reinterprets the traditional wall-mounted picture – with its visible front and concealed, purely structurally necessary reverse – within space, conceiving of this relationship as one of equivalence. Front and back remain recognisable as such, yet receive the same degree of attention. Design and construction can no longer be clearly separated, moving between image, body and architectural fragment.
The artist employs yoga mats not only as material carriers of colour, texture and form, but also as carriers of meaning. They point to a Western urban culture in which body, posture and self-perception are closely interconnected. Nude, pink and black tones, batik fabrics, fastening straps and bra straps likewise originate from a context in which the body is shaped, organised, clothed and supported. Here, the relationship between front and back finds a further correspondence: forward and backward bends in yoga form a sequence of expansion and contraction. What opens outward is set against what turns inward; front and back, inside and outside remain distinct while simultaneously existing in relation to one another.
Abstraction in twentieth-century painting opened up a realm of the pre-conceptual – an experience not mediated primarily through narrative or meaning, but through materiality, perception and attention. YOGA draws on this art-historical tradition while simultaneously engaging with the artist’s contemporary context of experience and practice. The cultural associations of the materials remain as present as questions of emptiness and presence, space and body, balance and composition, which are newly explored through a play of materials and forms, repetition and variation. | | | | The B-Part Exhibition space accompanies the future development of the Urbane Mitte Am Gleisdreieck with artistic autonomy and thus at the same time enters into a dialogue with the overarching themes of the overall project - forms of New Work, Co-working, Culture and Sport - and creates synergies between artistic, cultural and social approaches. The artistic director of the B-Part Exhibition is Rüdiger Lange (loop - raum für aktuelle kunst). |
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