BERLIN.- Kit Schulte Contemporary Art announces the first group exhibition in 2013 entitled Cock-and-Bull Stories.

The exhibition Cock-and-Bull Stories celebrates the art of lying and deceiving, cheating, fantastic ideas and delusion. Artists Jörg Bong, João Galrão, Volker März, Sandra Munzel, Joan Ryan, Natascha Stellmach, Deborah Wargon and Christopher Winter tell us their cock and bull stories through different media, either drawing, photography or sculpture. The results are dubious, fantastic and sometimes audacious narrations about our culture and its underlying myths.

The gallery becomes a place of ambiguous truths and invites the viewers to participate as voyeur and accomplice. Afterall is art itself the biggest lie, or to say it like Oscar Wilde: „Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.“

Natascha Stellmach, hit the headlines in 2008, when she invited the public to join her in smoking the ashes of Kurt Cobain, resulting in a massive media response. This evoked a dramatic reaction from the public, to the extent of sending the artist death threats. Stellmach’s works are text collages depicting these real and fictitious threat letters.

Christoph Schlingensief is celebrated as a legend in the arts and media. In the work Mirror, Mirror Schlingensief by Volker März, he is portrayed as a modern Narcissus in front of a mirror.

Cultural myths are topic of Joan Ryan, whose drawings refer to the visual vocabulary of American magazines and commercial advertisement of the 50s and 60s. For Ryan, this artistic fiction is an opportunity to reconstruct cultural memory and get closer to the masquerade of postmodern identity.

The large format photographies from the series ‚Spiegelteich’ (a reflecting pond) by Jörg Bong, underline the influence fairy tales have in our culture: impressive and atmospheric exposures of a real place in nature, which once was the model for Otto Ubbelohde1 for illustrating Grimm’s fairy tale books.

The pictorial content of Christopher Winter’s drawings have a fairy tale framework of flying figures and flowers. What appears at first glance to be quite innocent can reveal below the surface details of devastation, storms and sexual acts. The flowers form themselves into ghoulish faces that haunt the viewer. This is far from the ideal world. Winter really illustrates the telling of beautiful untrue things.

Along the lines are the scissor cut outs by Deborah Wargon: the change between a figurative presentation and a decorative ornament, which show an incidental similarity to microbiological structures.

The grotesque figures out of clay and wax populate Sandra Munzel’s works this exhibition – hybrids between phantasy and nightmare, the strangely intimate Un-beings, which forms the artist describes as a plunge into storytelling ‚I love it, when my figures haunt me, let me sink deeper into the spaces, where cock and bull stories become reality.

João Galrão recycles cultural icons, like Mona Lisa or Duchamp's 'Bicycle-Wheel', as paper collages: by cutting reproductions into pieces and combining them to new images. Partly ornament, partly visual narrations, they present a memorabilia of our cultural history.