Ellis & Parker von Sternberg – 'New Works'

'New Works' commemorates artist duo Ellis & Parker von Sternberg’s 2023 solo exhibition at the gallery, featuring a transcript of a conversation held between Ellis von Sternberg, Pieter Schoolwerth, and Nandi Loaf, edited and redacted by Parker von Sternberg, along with documentation of the show and images from the brother’s archive. This run of 200 copies features four different covers.

Spanning readymades, photography, and legal contracts, Ellis & Parker von Sternberg’s collaborative practice interrupts the processes transforming art-objects into documents of art theory. Enforcing the reminder that meaning is never inherent to objects; meaning is always produced – more specifically artistic meaning is produced, and so withheld, by Art Discourses. The brothers use gallery bureaucracy, its mirror image – the viewer’s trust – and their joined presumption of art’s moral and intellectual value, to ventriloquize a dialogue catering to positions professionalizing only their own critical interpretations; positions consolidating a connoisseurship of aesthetic-social encounters unto themselves, wherein Art, as meaningful, is intrinsically useful, and so merely a utility. The brothers simply hope to test the comforts of that usability.

“The object, the art work, is a crypt that vouches for the alien other we bury within it through our speech, its surface is just luster, glitter [...] Whatever is beneath such a surface, no matter how tasteless, no matter how morbid, is already relegated to a resource for this bloated and perverse process of interpreting and discoursing.”