Alexandra Bircken's exhibition in Neuss: The sculptor's image atlas

Smartphone stiff neck now comes in handy to examine Alexandra Bircken's archive spread out on a 23 meter long glass display at the Langen Foundation. With “Silver Lining,” the well-known artist presents a collection of photos, magazine pages, printed screenshots and objects that have grown and created since the 1990s. Instead of a common thread that holds everything together, thematic islands now emerge.

Bircken, born in 1967, has made a name for herself primarily as a sculptor. Visually powerful - she sometimes cuts up real motorcycles - she works on the relationship between things, consumption and bodies. At the entrance to the exhibition is her textile work Lapsus (2010), which hangs from the ceiling like a kind of patchwork curtain. To remind us that arranging images and objects is also weaving together their narratives, this insertion was not necessarily needed.

The way Alexandra Bircken ties together the chains of motifs in the private art foundation of the Rhenish entrepreneurial family Langen has something of the overrated humor of a poetry slam: the hyped-up Yves Saint Laurent lipstick on a magazine page meets a wooden bullet casing, the pointed shape of which appears again in the photo of a silver-colored ring, the shape of which imitates a fingernail. The tip of the fingernail is conceptually reflected in the four Aimovig migraine syringes next to it, and at the end of this chain there is a ballpoint pen. After all, it also has a pointed end...

Alexandra Bircken: “Silver Lining”. Langen Foundation Neuss, until April 11, 2027

The compilation of recurring motivic elements across themes and media is reminiscent of Aby Warburg's Mnemosyne picture atlas, begun in 1924 and never completed. In contrast to Warburg, who tried with meticulous ambition to trace the evolution of ancient images from art history to the advertising industry, Bircken takes a less empirical approach. Instead, she seems to be more interested in fleeting, sentimental parallels, as becomes clear in the juxtaposition of the photos of a breastfed baby and two docking ICE trains.

Or in the photo of a tree whose constantly growing bark stubbornly resists a metal fence, whose grid shape in turn appears as an imprint on a photographed knee. The similarity to Wolfgang Tillmans is unmistakable, with whom she shares both the photographic infatuation with the inconspicuous and the passing by as well as her roots in the fashion industry.

Here and there fragments point to those beginnings. These include photographed fabric threads that can be found next to stitched wounds. A foam face in a coffee cup, which is in the immediate vicinity of a woman in a Battoulah mask and a star in Heidi Lee's Endless Echo Hat studded with Swarovski crystals.

Torn between poetry and pathos, transience appears object-like in the 23-meter showcase. At one end - or beginning - an egg, at the other flattened orange peels, which in turn are reminiscent of Bircken's motorcycle suits abstracted back to animal skins. Placing an excerpt from an article on longevity and anti-aging next to a fresh baguette makes you smile. RIP, Dieter Roth, you would have clapped your hands.