NAK is proud to present the first institutional solo shows of the Brazilian artist Alexandre da Cunha and of the English artist Damien Roach in Germany. Both artists deal in their works with found and respectively cheap or unpretentious materials and given social problematic. While Alexandre da Cunha is directly implying politics, the works of Damien Roach handle the subject on a different philosophical level. In the interplay of both artists the power of existence in aspects of daily grind and trivia, the hidden poetic of the unimposing as well as the fragile, vulnerable and precarious becomes a symbol for the human condition in the present society.

Damien Roach focuses the dislocation of signification in daily objects which bear the traces of their usage in a sense of discovery of the unfamiliar in the usual. The indefinite and passing experience as well as the missing and invisible are subjects in his works, which express themselves in different media like painting, video, animation, drawing and three dimensional works. For the exhibition at NAK the artist will produce a series of works which deal with the absent, the missing, the empty spot as a fragile, precarious element of being. The absent, elusive, volatile, and respectively “almost-nothing” as sense making and at the same time brittle sign of all being can let the viewer down into a tumble of significance.

Alexandre da Cunha often works with cheap mass products, which often originate from the domestic environment. In these apparently altered pieces, the implications of the political appear are presented through the precarious and banal, and an artistic approach which utilises the idea of appropriation and refers to materials employed in daily life. Like the bricoleur, da Cunha reinterprets materials and their implict meanings. More recent works of the artist refer directly to the art systems and to Modernism.  The conditions of perception and cognition of Modern Art as well as the value of art is scrutinized through the use of low-cost materials.