Becoming a New Entity | Niko Abramidis &NE

Niko Abramidis &NE (*1987 in Europe, lives and works in Munich and Berlin, DE) opens up a diverse spectrum dealing with economic structures and visions of the future. Within his drawings, paintings, sculptures and room installations, Niko Abramidis &NEs develops parallel universes in which he creates fictitious corporate identities and appropriates forms of expression from financial economics. This also includes the play with words through signs, symbols and ciphers, via which he transfers his artistic ideas of myth and literary fiction. The artist develops a semiotics of archaic symbols paired with sketchy drawings, which he puts together using the latest technologies.

This Viewing Room combines works from the solo show NExECON with further information and thus provides a playful insight into the New Entity.

As if from some kind of strategic corporate management plan, large, machine-like works from Niko Abramidis & NE's series of Cryptic Machine Prototypes, initiated in 2018, hang on the walls. The raw steel surfaces, from the openings of which colored light emerges, as well as symbols, screens and pinpads, indicate possible functions as machines or control elements, the functionality of which has disappeared or at least is no longer understandable. The integrated videos play with the aesthetics of image films from banks and companies that have long gone insolvent. The images of nature, broken by fading in a code, are reminiscent of greenwashing campaigns by large companies.

Photo: Dirk Tacke

"As an artist I am an entrepreneur. In that sense, I see my artistic work as corporate culture. The suffix &NE indicates that I am not a private person, but that I act as part of a larger entity. My decisions therefore always depend on the strategy of the management".

– Niko Abramidis &NE

Photo: Dirk Tacke

Truly wonderful!

Here I now sit,
Near the desert and yet
So far from the desert again,
And in no way desolate

– Friedrich Nietzsche, Dionysos-Dithyramben (1891)

Photo: Dirk Tacke

Blitz Blanko Invest (2020) is a semi-transparent curtain showing parts of a greatly enlarged € 500 bill, which, when divided and mirrored, builds an almost symmetrical image. The motif of a bridge extends across the entire width, showcasing towers, in the form of Europe, in the center. On the top of this bridge, conflicting with the principles of modern architecture, stand two pyramids: non-reconstructable structures of an ancient high culture that seem to be able to survive any crisis.
From both sides of the bridge, lightning bolts ignite the surroundings, threateningly extending over the world below, as if from an unknown, mystical source. This mix of mystical symbols, supernatural power and the adaptation of the Euro allude to the current state of the financial economy, which, due to its impenetrable structures, is unfathomable to comprehend, and can only be believed. Like a protective curtain and at the same time with a threatening motif, Blitz Blanko Invest hangs in the entrance of the gallery and raises questions about a common Europe beyond a cohesive monetary union.

Photo: Dirk Tacke

"Abramidis &NE develops a cryptography of the present: a gay science of turbocapitalism."

– Georg Imdahl, ars viva Katalog 2019

"The haptic, material, transforming, crazy, confusing and imaginative nature of art is all the more important today. It helps people to remain free. It fights against stagnation, the repetition of the ever-same. For me, art is not another facet of the capitalized event world, but poetic."

– Niko Abramidis &NE