Bert Esenherz: Dear Human
Solo is proud to present Dear Human by Bert Esenherz.
In the works that comprise the exhibition Dear Human, numeric systems are employed alongside pictorial symbols that give way to a system of dots and squares. All of these, when deciphered with a simple key, refer to sentimental notions of home, such as Home Sweet Home, Our Town, and Love Here & Now. They are also the titles of the paintings.
Bert’s vision of the future includes a series of dissipating landscapes, where all traces of humans and their structures will be destroyed, as in ancient civilizations. As imagined scientific documentation, some of the pieces are dated in the present and some in the near and distant future.
Is Dear Human a dystopian vision of the future? Not necessarily. The future is still in our hands. While the artist believes we don’t have to save the world because the planet will exist without us, we do have a practical obligation to protect the environment in which we live. In the end, the message of this show is a direct appeal from the artist, “Dear Human, enjoy the life you have right now.”
A native Berliner, Bert Esenherz was born in 1961, the year the Berlin Wall was constructed. A child of the Cold War, he understood the constraints of life in a politically divided city. So it comes as no surprise that when he reached his twenties, he left Berlin seeking personal freedom. He found it on the water.
After learning to sail on Lake Constance in Southern Germany, he traveled through Europe during a two-year stint as a sailing instructor, and ultimately captained ships across the Atlantic. While this proved to be a formative experience, art was always on his mind.
In 1989, Bert enrolled in Münster School of Design to study media design, but the fall of the Berlin Wall drew him back to the streets of Berlin. His Wall Hall project tapped into the zeitgeist of the underground techno-rave culture. For these events, the artist had only 24 hours to install and strike elaborate decorations for rave parties that drew upwards of 10,000 attendees.
His interest in the temporal nature of contemporary art led him to organize site-specific art installations publically created over the course of two months, and systematically destroyed by the artists as an opening night performance piece. By the mid-90s, Bert moved away from the Berlin party scene and found a new home in New York City.
There, he gravitated toward filmmaking and produced a series of satirical shorts about urban life. After years of struggling to sell his artwork on the streets, he embraced performance art as a means of self-promotion. A 2001 cross-country trip finally garnered the artist some attention.
The project was conceived as a way to promote art in local communities while fulfilling the artist’s desire to discover his newly adopted country. Bert created a 7’ x 5’ painting and mounted it on wheels, intending to walk it across America. The plan was to sell his art along the way.
He got as far as Denver when the money ran out and he traded his possessions for a Greyhound ticket back to New York. When he finally raised enough money to continue the journey 9/11 happened and everything changed. The resulting economic downturn created an opportunity for him to show for the first time in Los Angeles, where he permanently relocated in 2018. He currently lives and works in San Pedro.