Snow Man Video Still, 2012  0:49 secs.

SPECIAL X is an artist group founded by Shiho Yuki (Japan), Eva Nauman (Germany) and Christopher Winter (England) in Berlin in 2002. Their aim is to highlight the crisis points in the Art World through subversions of Art World practices. Their Manifesto Show (2005) was the beginning of these acts, which showed the Manifesto paintings in the windows of Cafe Moscow, the former Politbüro hangout on Karl-Marx-Allee, Berlin. The sixty-nine point Manifesto was also broadcast by a computer voice on the street outside Cafe Moscow 24 hours a day. 

Together they focus on crisis, art and commerce and undermine established notions of Art institutions.

 In their latest work Slogans, the group hold a mirror up to the global art scene by using strategies established by Pop, Abstract Art and Street Art. A finger is poked at the naïve, political tendencies prevalent in Biennales throughout the world. They strive to make meaningful work that brings the art world back to its modernist roots and create an artistic dialogue between form, colour, text and image. The protest slogans that they employ are only cheekily provocative. Vip Lounge Riot will never happen amongst the privileged. The cocaine-fuelled parties of Art Basel Miami Beach are a far cry from the current political naivety of the Documenta 13. Special X insists that they are not being ironic; they want to make great art. We wlll be artistic as fuck was their motto in the Manifesto Show.

In their films they aim to make a move toward the moving picture as “tableaux” connected to time and away from the documentary style videos and minor short films that plague the biennale setting. This is a gallery, not a cinema. Love is an endlessly shifting scene that mirrors our attempts to make relationships and hold on to love. Snow Man is fast and furious and can only be consumed like a drug in the fleeting time that it lasts, 49 seconds. It refers to the moguls of the art world with their Art Cocaine Global lifestyles. 

 Special X are very much about No Bull, No Shit as they would say themselves.

For Special X

“they truly are the best artists, and so real“

Jacinta Homans in the Bild Zeitung

Christopher Winter is represented by Edelman Arts, New York and  Lehr Zeitgenössische Kunst, Cologne.

Friday 21st September 2012 from 7pm

Forelle

Südstern 6 │ 10961 Berlin

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