About Giovanni Segantini and life

Michael Krüger on paintings by Giovanni Segantini - that was the theme of a reading at KiS at the end of October 2024. The audience experienced the author Michael Krüger, but also the publisher, who, as the long-standing director of Carl Hanser Verlag, has followed and helped shape the German-language literary scene like no other. In conversation with Rafael Jablonka, he explored the significance of painting in all our lives. What is it about pictures that fascinates us and makes us want to spend a lifetime with them? Why do people need pictures? They are "probably what remains of us and show what we have lost forever." 

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On the program: PictureReading 

A big jungle party. A nest with eggs - or birds? Creatures on stilts. The children "read" Ross Bleckner's pictures in their own way - with an open mind and an alert eye. They then put their version of flowers and blossoms on paper while painting. Juliana Haider, who designed the two children's programs under the motto BilderLesen (Reading pictures) at the beginning of July 2024, also had a large box of musical instruments with her: rattles, drums, triangles, sound snakes ... everything that was needed for a loud final concert of the visit to KiS.

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Music by Glass and Shostaktovich 

"A wonderful musical summer evening" - "This is beautiful" - "The performance was outstanding." These and similar were the reactions of the audience at the concert at KiS in early July 2024. The cedag quartet performed two string quartets no. 3: the one by Philip Glass, which is based on the music originally composed for the film "Mishima - A Life in Four Chapters". And the string quartet by Dmitri Shostakovich, composed in 1946, shortly after the war. The evening with Martin Yavryan and Clemens Gahl (violins), Ernst Theuerkauf (viola) and Peter Polzer (violoncello) was a thank you to the members of our KiS association. 

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The image of the flower. Flower pictures

Ross Bleckner did not personally travel from New York to Seefeld for the opening of his exhibition at the end of June 2024. However, he conveyed his thoughts as a text contribution for the catalog, which was published on the occasion of the exhibition. "any interest I have in flowers is an interest I actually have in pictures of flowers," he says, for example. For him, the pictures are placeholders for the light and the dark. They allow us to find beauty when it seems as if the world around us is falling apart. The flower paintings on display at KiS date from the years 1995 to 2022 and mark different stages in Bleckner's life, which he has realized artistically. 

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Pia Fries in conversation at the finissage

Pia Fries' exhibition came to an end in March 2024 with an exciting round of talks. Maria-Anna Meßner-Haidenthaler from the Tyrolean State Museum Ferdinandeum conducted the discussion with the artist and Rafael Jablonka. "Basically, I want to paint a good picture", Pia Fries summed up her working method in a simple way. She then went on to explain what is important to her when painting. Colors, lines, but also the support of the picture are essential elements of the creative process for Fries. The support, in this particular case the wood, also paints, "it has a say," says the artist. In our photo, she can be seen with her husband, the artist Hans Brändli, and Rafael Jablonka. 

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Reading with saxophone accompaniment

Every poem, even the shortest, can turn into a blossoming poem, it could probably even explode, for immeasurable stores of glory and cruelty are hidden everywhere, waiting patiently for our gaze ...

This is how "Erblühendes Poem" begins, a poem by Adam Zagajewski, which Alexandra Maria Jablonka (right) performed at a special evening for KiS members in February 2024. The texts by Rainer Maria Rilke, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Louise Glück, Emily Dickinson and others were accompanied by Juliana Haider on the saxophone - sometimes with her own compositions. 

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