Solo show: Maria und Natalia Petschatnikov: Sidewalk - Installation, Malerei (over)

	Maria & Natalia Petschatnikov Water öl auf Leinwand, 50 x 70 cm 2007

Galerie Wagner + Partner Galerie Wagner + Partner Strausberger Platz 8 10243 Berlin Germany (city map) Send E-mail tel +49 30 219 60 137 www.galerie-wagner-partner.com

The exhibition 'Sidewalk' places the immediate surroundings into centre stage, the everyday stroll through the city. While being inevitably grounded, we are still moving through unknown territory. Maria and Natalia Petschatnikov explore the cityscape at kerbstone-level. They turn their eyes downwards, onto the horizontal border between the buildings and the footpath and thus discover uncharted territory. The border becomes permeable in the installation, which was designed for the rooms in the gallery at Karl-Marx-Allee, the street pavement continues inside the gallery and countless pigeons have settled in…

The twins Maria and Natalia Petschatnikov (*1973) always work as artistic duo in the areas of painting and installation. In their works the world appears through the eyes of two very closely connected individuals. Doubled-up and repeated objects turn into traces of a complex relationship that reflect the internal and external world of two people.

Where does the personal world begin, and where does it end? Where are the borders located between private and public, between trivial and profound? Can we still find our place?

The Petschatnikovs connect to the artists Fischli and Weiss through a childlike joy of discovery and the humorous rendering of the surrounding environment. With fantasy, humour and depth they extract surprising new perspectives from the ordinary.

Both succeed again and again in their paintings and installations in giving everyday objects and unspectacular interiors new meaning. Haphazard objects are analysed, painted, painstakingly reconstructed. Ordinary things become extraordinary arrangements hat reveal new layers of meaning. Trash turns to poetry.