Glenda Cinquegrana Art Consulting is proud to present
From May 21st to June 4th, 2025.
On our Artsy page
Glenda Cinquegrana Art Consulting is pleased to present Critical Spirit, an exclusive online exhibition dedicated to the renowned German artist Joseph Beuys (Krefeld, 1921), now available on our Artsy page.
“Art is the only power to free humankind from all repression.”
(Joseph Beuys)
Joseph Beuys turns art into a political and pedagogical act—a tool to deconstruct power structures and to awaken consciousness. His artistic practice, which he called “social sculpture,” conceives artwork as a participatory process, where objects and actions become vehicles for actively reshaping society. For our Online Viewing Room (OVR), the gallery features three emblematic works, two of which are related to sound, a cornerstone of Beuys’s performative practice.
Ja ja ja Ne ne ne (1968) embodies dialectic process as a democratic engine through an experimental tape piece created with composer Henning Christiansen. Recorded at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1968, the work deploys the obsessive repetition of “Ja” (yes) and “Nee” (no), modulating tones and inflexions to generate a rhythmic hypnosis. With its claustrophobic soundscape, the piece serves as an anti-anthem for a society that pretends a dialogue yet thrives on conflict. In this case, art doesn’t offer any solution: it forces the public to confront an endless loop of contradictions, urging to escape only through an act of critical awareness.
Ein Rose für direkte Demokratie (A Rose for Direct Democracy, 1973) guards an emblematic silence. A rose sealed in glass becomes an oxymoron: organic beauty immobilized, conveying an ideal that survives only when shielded by a vessel negating its spontaneity. Beuys does not glorify direct democracy but exposes its fragility, turning the work into a survival experiment—art as utopias incubator.
Noiseless Eraser (1974), a chalkboard eraser, completes the trilogy. Beuys used his chalkboards as tools for theorising, where art-as-commitment remains a hypothesis perpetually in need of proof. The eraser symbolises education as subversion: erasing is not an act of annihilation but a preparation for new narratives. Beuys inverts the dogma: the void becomes a promise of collective knowledge, to be rewritten free of ideological noise.
Through these works, Beuys employs sound, symbols, and objects to unmask power dynamics. Though formally diverse, they share a common root: an obsession with the generative act of nurturing a critical spirit.
