When we look at a body, we first see its exterior. A form whose surface lies somewhere between movement and expression – and at whose boundaries the individual and collective stories of our experiences are inscribed into the body like an archive. An appearance whose image is revealed in its characteristics, shaped by cultural and identity affiliations, norms and values. But what is a body? Something we see – or something we believe to be permanent? Something that exists in relationships and dependencies?

In moments that connect us to spaces, locations and the things in our environment. Or something that resists and challenges our gaze as we search for similarities and identification? Something that is noticeably independent, changeable and malleable – far removed from the boundaries imposed on it by anatomy, identity and society. And that determines the rules of its own freedom.

Under the title Heart Core, Linn Lühn is delighted to announce a group exhibition featuring works by Alexandra Bircken, Talia Chetrit, Carmen D’Apollonio, Linder, Meret Oppenheim and Nicole Wermers that centers around the significance of the body. Taking its cue from Alexandra Bircken’s work of the same name, Heart Core focuses on opening up a new perspective on a supposedly female-connoted theme, against the backdrop of a female examination of one’s own body as a typically feminine moment. A dialogue between different generations and perspectives, whose artistic approaches seek to question, interconnect and ultimately reinterpret the body. In their exchange, its parts rearrange themselves, traces emerge and bodies courageously reveal themselves as an accumulation of characteristics, meanings and emotions, in which their function as biological metaphors transcends the contours of a purely female anatomy. In Alexandra Bircken’s sculptures, these fragments seem tactilely linked together like organs along interwoven threads and vividly rephrase the question of their boundaries through an infinitely expanding set of visible openings and impressions.

Strategies of cutting, rearranging and appropriating extend this intervention into his skin, made of leather, rubber or wool, like a cut with a scalpel, and open up a view into an inner, hidden world that lies behind his images. Here, the facets of the body emerge quietly and sublime as collaged symbols in Linder’s photomontages from the shadows of the ideas projected onto them – only to overlap with media reproductions of everyday life from advertising and culture to form visual ciphers. Images in which the body finds himself in an intimate relationship with a camera and explores the possibilities of his agency, authorship and intimacy.

Linked to the multi-layered references of our material culture, the body simultaneously reflects the strategies of its environment. Confidently it presents itself in Nicole Wermer’s Proposal for a Monument to a Reclining Female resting on the products that are considered part of its nutrition, while pointing out our dependence on physical and social structures and its integration into the world of commodities. In doing so, it laughingly eludes any stylistic classification and positions itself as an enigmatic signifier located between a surreal torso and an abstract lamp sculpture. In their echo, the nuances of social, cultural and emotional codes attributed to it shift and reveal a different, more real image of the body. One that makes it visible in its narrative structures – beyond material and stereotypical interpretations, and free from attributions of gender.