Normal Group – exhibitions

1979
Bonn (advertising board) /Galerie Magers/ 
Düsseldorf /Fussgängerzone/

1980
Normal. Galerie H. J. Müller, Köln
Normal. Times Square Show, New York
 Normal. Galerie Defet, Nürnberg
XI Biennale de Paris. Musée d´Art Modern

1981
  Rundschau Deutschland. Lothringerstr. 13, München
Aljofre Barroco. Salone di Palazzo Ducezio/Noto (Italy)
Normal. Museo Civico d´Arte Contemporanea, Gibellina
Bildwechsel. Akademie der Künste, Berlin
Normal. Neue Galerie und Sammlung Ludwig, Aachen

1982
Normal. Galerie Nörballe, Kopenhagen
Normal und Freunde. Galerie Beck im Frauenmuseum, Bonn  

1984
Von hier aus. Neue deutsche Kunst. Messegelände Halle 13, Düsseldorf  (skupina /gruppo/ Normal)  

1986
Gruppe Normal. Graphikmappe des Griffelkunstverlags, Hamburg

2005
Normal Group. Prague Biennale 2, Karlín Hall, Praha

2006
   Group Normal. Flash Art Museum, Trevi
Group Normal. Museo d´Arte Contemporanea, Isernia

Text z katalogu Normal / Catalogue Normal Group
Museo Civico di Gibellana, Italy 1981
Demetrio Paparoni
In the Circus of the Metropolis  

The loss of sense: a way of life has been consumed, the modern way which presupposes faith in ideology; communication - the communication system - has been parallely renewed. Related to an aimless reality which has put the hope of emancipation at zero, language has discovered itself to be deprived of its old role as a vehicle of information. Man today - as Lyotard affirms - no longer believes that in a marxist system all will be well in the end; in the same way the thesis that in a capitalist society everyone will get rich is no longer credible. Such awareness has not stopped any clock nor could it ever have done so, but the becoming in time has stopped being optimistic as it was for modern man who, moving inside a mentality culturally connotated as avant-guard lived on hopes of progress.
     It was thought that, interrogating itself on its own specific, language "spoke", that it gave, that is, new acquisitions. And so undoubtedly was the case, but in the end such awareness showed itself to be progressively demotivated by the loss of ideology: as if philosophical language had found itself without points to explain and the meaning of words and images consequently thinned down to become transparent.
     Moving beyond the experiences of the modernist problematic, contemporary culture has enstaged an operative impartiality which is dance momentarily tendent towards liberation, speed of mind that consumes without seeing any problems, remembrances rendered a funrtion of the play of expressive liberty: we have gone from an aesthetic composed of fragments to an aesthetic of the fragment inside mental dimensions characterized by the loss of ideological moralisms. All is allowed - paradoxically, even the making of fragments of a nearer past become "relevant again"-because culture haunts a no man's land belonging to all, a place deprived of the magnetism of erudite allusions.
      The intuition has not been to recuperate, if only in an instrumental manner, fragments of the past; it has been, if at all, a necessity as much as to succeed in utilizing a language that, freezing the functions of reference points, has taken away our keys to the reading of a work.

      Also in the works of Peter Angermann, Milan Kunc, John Hummel and Jan Knap the images are singularly recognizable but their succession and accumulation give evanescent wholes. The painting is the ftame delimiting ftagments which fit together like pieces ftom different jigsaw puzzles and live in the new context shorn of their original meanings, the negation of the primal common sense.  
A painting released from the ideological yoke cannot but be foreign to a concept that makes art a journey conditioned by the fidelity to a project. So, the painting of the Normal Group is narrative and each work exhaustively describes a different subject experienced as a further possibility of communication. The thread that holds the works of Angermann, Kunc, Hummel and Knap together and that makes Normal a group for all intents and purposes seems to be identifiable in that these artists do not create information, they inform us, that is, of things that we already know: navigating the performable of their own existere they furnish expressions for use and communication. And it is in the difference between performability and information that lies the sense of the authentic open interpretation of their work. Our attention is drawn towards known elements, come to us from a window opened on purpose: everyday things consumed and experienced and still generalizable. The painting does not speak words to be listened to but if looked at in the eyes allows itself to be perceived. A language reemerges in which the high (quality of painting) and the low (the banality of the everyday) are inscribed in a dynamic relationship of interchange which is no longer dialectic.
      The Normal Group paints what it sees: a love story or a sports story, an ecological tragedy or a war joke. We do not laugh. Irony leading up to satire is not the intention.
      If ftagments are recognizable in these paintings which bring the Neue Sachlichkeit to mind it has no ideological implications in that, while the Neue Sachlichkeit set itself educational aims vis à vis its public by showing subjectivized ima­ges presented as though objective, the Normal Group does not want to state truths. It likewise exudes the conviction that an artist can allow himself to reject many social roles but cannot not draw a fake tear on his own white mask, prop of the nightly show of the melancholy and pathetic circus of the iridescent carnival of the metropolis.