Florian Huber

Veredelung

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Exhibition from December 06th to January 07th, 2023

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Veredelung

What is left when the lights go on? The sound systems lose their purpose and remain silent. Only the leftovers of confetti, bottle caps, champagne lids and cigarette butts bear witness to the raucous parties. The clubs have to leave Neukölln to allow real estate owners to make even more profits with their concrete gold.

 

At any rate, this is how nihilistic the compilation of works in this exhibition could be interpreted. However, the design, the attention to detail and the materials betray a much more positive reading, which is also reflected in the exhibition title „Veredelung“ („Refinement“). Hamburg-based artist Florian Huber is a trained forester. The practice of grafting two plant varieties to create a more noble, hardy plant was the inspiration for the exhibition title. How can the need for subcultural open spaces of club culture be reconciled with urban planning? How can the fences and demarcation mechanisms of a champagne-drinking milieu designed for luxury be overcome, perhaps even torn down, and how do we ensure that the booming basses of Funktion One still carry us through the nights in the morning?    

 

Florian Huber preserves moments of escapism and turns them into everlasting symbols of desire. He has collected the leftovers from the very last party of Hamburg‘s club Moloch and preserved it for eternity. When it became quiet in the clubs during the first Corona lockdown, the artist took photographs of the Funktion One Soundsystem in the Waagenbau in Hamburg and immortalized them in paintings. The works become monuments, appealing to our collective memory and calling for a sensitive urban development in which everyday life, residential life and club culture mutually refine and do not destroy each other.

 

function (g)one

Techno-rave culture has been shaping our society since the 1990s. Determined by „noise“ and movement, it stands for a boundless, hedonistic lifestyle. The subculture‘s safe spaces are often its clubs, which, in addition to excess, become places of encounter, self-awareness and expansion of consciousness. The fact that these places can take on an emancipatory and important cultural role in society has even been recognised in part by politicians since the pandemic. Now that the loudspeakers are silent and dance parties are forbidden, we realise how important the club scene is for large parts of the population.

 

Under the title „function (g)one“, I am creating a series of pictorial still lifes. Photographs from various clubs serve as models. The first diptych shows probably the world‘ s most famous sound system: a Funktion One. The photograph was taken during the first Lockdown at the Waagenbau in Hamburg.

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Florian Huber​

Looking at the works and the choice of materials, it seems as if Hamburg-based artist Florian Huber is constantly reinventing himself. His growing list of works and materials ranges from huge installations made of site fences, sculptures made of razor wire and wood, residues of our consumer and party society cast in epoxy resin, monochrome structural works that seem like three-dimensional paintings, to actual paintings. But even though the materials of the works and their appearance are so different, the conceptual artist Huber, always remains true to himself in his choice of themes. Here everything revolves around transience, consumption (society), the question of when a thing is no longer a mere object but part of a work of art and what role the artist himself takes on in this value-creating system or can take on at all…