gallery hanahou is celebrating the release of Tina Berning’s new edition of her sold-out book 100 Girls on Cheap Paper. At the same time, Tina Berning is opening her second solo show in New York, titled “The Passengers,” an exhibition that has grown out of the artist’s 2009 Munich solo show “The Listeners.”

With “The Passengers,” Tina Berning continues to explore the relationships between conditioned aesthetics and supposed subjective ambition in the canon of contemporary visuals. The drawings formulate the artist’s own images of the human body, its inadequacy and its fundamental relation to self-determination. Tina Berning releases figures out of their heteronomous, medial contexts and shifts them into an interplay between voyeurism and exhibitionism. She uses her paintings and drawings as carriers to extricate subjects from the contemporary alienated incapacitation. Codes and matrices blanket faces, streaks of colour lie like shadows over the delicate silhouettes. Interventions that follow Tina Berning’s study open the plainness of schemes into the ambiguity of expression. She makes subtle corrections to the standard, uniform face and figure, enabling a look of physical expressiveness to return. Even when they appear fragile and vulnerable, the faces and images of the people take on a form that is more resistive.

gallery hanahou will also host a talk with the artist open to the public on Saturday, September 12th, at 2 p.m.