What do you do when the chief sends you to a gallery and its shut? 1. Try and call the gallery to see why it’s not open on a Wednesday afternoon! 2. Look for an alternative entrance. 3. See as much as you can through the window and finally 4. Give up. Go home. Come again another day! Thankfully, although the area is a bit low on other galleries, there are quite a few places to get a drink so I checked out Cafe Tasso. This was pretty much what happened when I first visited Galerie im Turm for the “aeiou” exhibition of Alexander Klenz.

Concentrated clarity

With my face squashed against the glass the exhibition was not looking to hopeful. My second attempt proved much more inspiring as seeing the works up close I was able to appreciate them individually and saw there was much more to the works than I had imagined. What really sticks with me is the structure in the works. You can see that an extremely steady hand and concentrated mind has been at work. The works appeared simple by generally using simple colours, shapes and lines but in actual fact great planning seems to have gone into creating the many angles, straight lines, smooth edges and geometric shapes. Some pieces even look like design plans.

Feeling blue?  Alexander Klenz, Courtesy of Galerie im Turm, Photo: Frances Cragg

A different kind of diary

There is a diary element to the exhibition which made me want to keep a visual diary like this. Out of the structured shapes I started to recognise the everyday by looking at a piece as a whole, not just the individual strong shapes within. Rectangles, squares and lines became a sky, a wall or a window. However everyday does not mean mundane in this case. Klenz has shown some boring usual experiences from a different angle. Not all of the pieces had an effect on me and some I just really didn’t get, but this is only to be expected when looking at someone else’s perspective.

What does it all mean?

I probably do this too much but I like to find the connection (or my own version of the connection!) between the exhibition title and works on show.  A, e, i, o and u are vowels and the most commonly used letters. We need vowels to make sense and structure words which don’t make sense without them. Looking at my previous sentences you will struggle to find a vowel-less word! You encounter them every day, don’t think much about them but they are important if you want to communicate – the building blocks of language. Maybe I’m looking into it too much, after all could the connection be simply that like words art speaks to us. Instead of using language to keep this diary, Klenz has used images.

• Galerie im Turm Alexander Klenz – “aeiou”, April 6th – May 6th, Tue – Sun: 12pm – 7pm

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Painting by Catrin Walz Stein

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