Galerie b2

Doris Frohnapfel’s new artworks are inspired by historical photographs
of international trading floors. They depict the trading floors blotched
with small papers from where the stockbrokers have randomly dropped
their notes. What is abstract in the sense of Marx – the quality behind
the notes – appears objectively on the floor. What is objective in the
photography of the exchanges becomes abstract again in Frohnapfel’s
collages and photograms. The artist has staged the flutter of the notes,
and photographs them in order to find new compositions using these
samples. This puzzlement of concreteness and abstraction could be
understood as a symbol of economic powerlessness. Doris Frohnapfel
counteracts this confusion with an artistic statement: all art is abstract
but not without an object. Ultimately, we come not from nothingness.
For the exhibition project “The Return of Investment” Doris Frohnapfel
engages with the history of mentality of the capital. At last the artist
was concerned with symbols of the abstract relationship between the
capital and the ware (in the exhibition “Papier” – Galerie M29, 2009) –
as once they appeared in the interior space or better interior life of the
(New York) stock exchange. Now Frohnapfel turns towards the
surrounding area of the Wall Street. She lays open historically grown
“shifts“ of the context of trafficking in money and persons. At the
beginning of the 18th century a prosperous slave market established on
Wall Street. The perfidy relationship between capital and corpus as
well as its disguise by the abstract terms of the modern financial system
– just imagine the term „human capital“ – substantiate in the historical
shifts on site. So Frohnapfels „archeological artefacts“ become
absolutely current.