In the organizer's words:

à jour - RAYMOND | SCHWIEKER | HAUPT

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A good thirty years ago, three young art students found their way into the studio community S.K.A.M. e.V. (Beim Trichter 2 / Reeperbahn 1)

Around the same time, Till F.E. Haupt began his photographic diary Days In A Life. Till Schwieker switched from drawing to prints and objects and Alexander Raymond developed his unmistakable style. Thirty years later, they "update" this friendship with an intervention at xpon-art:

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The S.K.A.M. was an unusual large studio at Trichter 1 on the Reeperbahn, an imposing space in a former bowling hall. It is still a legendary place of art production today, even though it was all demolished in 2009 after around twenty years and replaced by probably the ugliest new buildings in the City of Dancing Towers.

In fact, the mutual acquaintance of the artists Till F.E. Haupt, Till Schwieker and Alexander Raymond goes back some thirty years in this place. But the rooms of the xpon-art gallery exhibition shown here are also predestined in a special sense to be the site of the joint exhibition.

When we speak of Lebenszeit, we must first speak of TILL F.E. HAUPT'swork. It is a personification of time in its most individual form, when Haupt photographs himself every day in an ever similar form. The changes in appearance and countenance revealed in the "Days in a life" self-portraits created since 1995 find their counterpart in his evenly focused gaze into the camera. Haupt's own view of the world can be read in a different way: his body camera, the pinhole camera that functions as a bodycam, records what it sees over 24 hours, but as an image of the passage of time - the light and dark streaks therefore conceal a wealth of photographically recorded events, which are now visible in their blurred shadows. His position of "Real Live Art", which ultimately combines life with activism, thus unites not only the precise result, the unmasking of time and its inventory of all matter. But also the flowing and fleeting; that which cannot be captured.

The artist ALEXANDER RAYMOND works on a type of painting that is in principle representational, but with its complex surfaces and techniques proves to be a thoroughly complicated matter. The pictures are reminiscent of cubist formal language, although they also have a surrealist feel with their doll and fetish figures. Much appears as a superimposition of objects, but also of painterly textures. The perspectives and proportions of the painted world of objects do not always have to be based on reality, even if they are modeled on it in the most precise three-dimensionality. For although Raymond works resolutely with his imagination, his personage is often, if not always, made of wood or corrugated cardboard beforehand, so that it can have an immediate and direct effect as a model. In their possible over-sharpening by means of painterly techniques, the pictures also have something of a cinematic aspect of time and movement.

TILL SCHWIEKER works with a different kind of play with the three-dimensional. While his earlier work focused on the phenomenon of time, space has long since taken its place. He is not only interested in the specific characteristics of box shapes, for example, but also in the human perception of their spatial appearance. He thus places his motifs - architectural fragments, furniture or crates - in a field of tension between perceptions by working with reliefs that provide a very unique perspective view of things. By means of fine woodworking, he creates details that bring the innermost to the outside - but can also be the opposite of the two-dimensional drawing. His work is therefore relief and image, drawing and sculpture at the same time. Like Raymond, Schwieker also works with the illusionism of what pretends to be something, but is also something else.

The joint exhibition takes place here in the city in rather unique spaces. The xpon-art gallery is itself a kind of time capsule: the raw and very specific spaces, as if left behind indefinitely, invite you to fill them with your own history, with your own time.

(Text: Peter Boué)

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Vernissage

Thu. 11.12.2025 from 7 pm.

Opening hours

Saturdays, Sundays, Mondays and Tuesdays 6 - 9 pm (and by appointment)

Artist talk:

Sun, 14.12. 5 pm

Finissage

Sun. January 11, 2026 from 11 a.m. - 4 p.m.

Venue:

xpon-art gallery

Repsoldstraße 45

20097 Hamburg

www.xpon -art.de

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With the kind support of the Hamburg Ministry of Culture and Media

Price information:

Free admission, because everyone should have access to culture. However, you are welcome to make a donation if you would otherwise honor it. Drinks are available for a donation. We don't offer anything that we wouldn't drink ourselves. We conceive these exhibitions and run this space because we think it is important that there are constant and challenging positions between state museums and commercial galleries on the one hand and changing platforms for emerging art on the other - on the one hand to better promote artists who are not yet established, and on the other to create a more vibrant culture for communication between art and the public.