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Chris Sharp Gallery is thrilled to present a two-person exhibition of the German, Hamburg-based artist Jochen Lempert and the German, Berlin-based artist Lin May Saeed.

Jochen Lempert and Lin May Saeed share a deep and abiding interest in and commitment to questions and issues surrounding the animal kingdom and the natural world. Although they are longtime friends and colleagues with a mutual influence, this is the first time their work will be in direct dialogue in a two-person show. That said, for all the similarities in their shared subject matter, they approach it in totally different ways. Lempert’s black-and-white analog photographs examine the relationship between the human animal and the natural world. Vexing the Cartesian distinction between nature and culture, Lempert’s work richly explores the myriad interrelated links between the two. Whether through comparative mimesis, cohabitation or western aesthetics largely codified by the renaissance and modernism, his photos consider how nature and culture are in constant dialogue, co-evolving, overlapping, and finally, coexisting. Although political, Lempert’s work is far from utopian. It does not necessarily dream of an Edenic return to nature; if anything it is marked by a sober melancholy, arising from our obvious inability to move beyond the anthropocentric gaze.

Lin May Saeed makes sculptures, sculptural reliefs, drawings, works on paper, and video. The work is directly linked to and thematically informed by her interest in animals and her commitment to radical animal activism. It deals with the exploitation of animals, their depiction, liberation, and potentially harmonious relationships with human beings, and the often self-seeking cruelty of the latter. Saeed’s iconographic frame of reference is rich and varied. It includes Egyptian statuary, Greco-Roman sculpture, and scientific and natural history museum displays, among other things. Although she works with a variety of materials, styrofoam plays a very important role in her practice. Saeed is drawn to this material in large part for its intrinsic ugliness. Traditional sculptural materials such as bronze and marble are, as far as she is concerned, too beautiful (even when she does use bronze, she casts it from carved styrofoam and paints it white). For her, the uneasy complexity of styrofoam reflects the complexity of the subject matter she is dealing with, while presenting a host of real sculptural challenges – formal issues being just as important to her as they are in the photos of Jochen Lempert.