A rather inflated title announces that the exhibition itself is addressed. The press is given the freedom to use the title as they see fit – be that the full title, the first two lines, any line… – within any appropriate layout for the context. It is a title that foresees that it will be cropped by institutional frameworks and conventions, suggesting the media assume their share in creating meaning. The Lumiar Cité/Maumaus webpage will indicate the full title.

Besides potentially disturbing the usual habits of cultural news agents and art critics, as well as the day-to-day of exhibition production habits of Maumaus/Lumiar Cité, the functioning of the gallery was scrutinised by Tonio Kröner (Germany,1983). The artist takes on the larger responsibility of running the space, where curatorial decisions and the production of individual artworks merged. The gallery logo has been moved and the exhibition title now occupies a rather large, central part of the glass façade, while the hand-out and list of works have been brought together on a poster based on a blown-up version of the gallery’s letterhead, which simultaneously features as the exhibition’s printed invite. The artist also selected a table and chairs so the gallery manager can take her place in the show. A rather dense prelude for what is to come.

Translations of time and renderings of techniques; gestural expressionism and pop phenomena from the late 1970s, early 1980s, which continue to resonate among different generations; two Muppets Show figures from an imaginary bunch of extras (the ones without character) and, when it comes to their presentation in the exhibition, literally speaking twice – one presented in the gallery in Alta de Lisboa and the other bored on a chair at the headquarter offices of the entity running the gallery in downtown Lisbon (Maumaus, mind the different opening times and addresses!) A number of paintings will be shown in the gallery, in their evocation of an author from the past, where a predominantly gestural expressionism turns in Kröner’s translation into tense paintings on a non-suitable medium of coarse jute canvases. The gallery walls are fully occupied: the paintings’ predominant reds tango with the brick walls of Lumiar Cité, the sizes of the evoked originals are adapted to fit in the space.

The title poem (a translation by Maumaus of the poem ‘Halfway Down’ by Alan Alexander Milne, published in 1924) might be understood as a leitmotif for Kröner’s negotiations of the phenomena of exhibition, painting, sculpture and the interior. Could the neither up nor down, the evocation of an unpopular place in the middle be a key to how to read the show? The transposition of gestural expressionism into a (cramped) conceptual gesture suggests a place in-between, an uncomfortable place, like a table in the middle of a restaurant where no one wants to sit. The apparent lack of a free flow of gestures and depths in Kröner’s expressionism allows him to bypass the problem of authenticity, enabling him to deal on his terms with a threshold period, when large-scale painting by men were the predominant artistic expressions and the Muppet’s Show was broadcast. Kröner was born after the late 1970s and knows about that time through hearsay and research, understanding it from today’s (his) perspective; it still resonates as a moment of change from decades of discipline and control, when definitions of good and evil were still seemingly clear, to current times of anxiety and identity. Besides all these suggestive elements, Kröner´s exhibition does not offer sensual elevation or hermetic depth: the references of the allegorical are for Kröner material to play and work with, from which he derives modes of aesthetical experience.


Tonio Kröner (1984) lives and works in Berlin. Notable among his solo and collective exhibitions are: ‘Tonio Kröner (ed.). ‘Silhouettes (With text contributions by Vanessa Place, Simon Thompson and Keaton Ventura), Vienna: Westphalie, 2017, English, 17 x 12 cm, 68 pages, 3 spot colour double-spreads, 580 ex., ISBN 978-3-903216-00-6. €9, free coffee’, Nousmoules (Vienna, 2018); ‘Is it language that they’re after? (keine*r antwortete.)’, Kunsthalle Exnergasse (Vienna, 2018); ‘Something Stronger Than Me*’, WIELS (Brussels, 2017); ‘Emulate & Imitate’ (with Niklas Lichti), Ve.sch (Vienna, 2015); ‘I Hate my Village’, M1 Arthur Boskamp-Stiftung (Hohenlockstedt, 2014); ‘Vienna Complex’, Austrian Cultural Forum New York (New York, 2014) and ‘Bubbletearz’, WCW-Gallery (Hamburg, 2013).

The exhibition is a collaboration between Maumaus, Associação de S. Bartolomeu dos Alemães em Lisboa, and Goethe-Institut Portugal, in partnership with the Maumaus Residency Programme, and is part of the event Fogo Island Dialogues: Atlantic Codes (Lisbon, 08.-09.11.2019).