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Tilo Baumgärtel,
Peter Busch, Tim Eitel, Christoph Ruckhäberle, David Schnell,
Matthias Weischer
March 21 - April 26 2003
Opening Friday March 21 2003 from 17-19
It is a great pleasure to present an exhibition with paintings by
the German artists Tilo Baumgärtel, Peter Busch, Tim Eitel,
Christoph Ruckhäberle, David Schnell and Matthias Weischer.
It is the first time the artists show in Galleri Nicolai Wallner.
All of them are graduates from the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig
and have founded Galerie Liga in Berlin together with five other
artists. The small and large scale paintings for the show are all
figurative and refer in various ways to earlier isms in the modern
history of art. However, these paintings all go about the tradition
in new and unseen ways, both formally and in their subject matter.
Tilo Baumgärtel's paintings are realistic, figurative and narrative.
The motifs are urban landscapes empty of people, driverless locomotives
and empty stadiums, overgrown with trees. The colours are disturbingly
surreal which accentuate the complexity of contents. Baumgärtel's
paintings are ambivalent scenarios that balance between the everyday
life and nightmare visions.
The paintings by Peter Busch use elements from a well-known iconography.
The images of parks, villas, mountains are Neo-Romantic and they
are a resumption of an abandoned German tradition. The delicately
light and translucent paintings are melancholic representations
of isolated houses or individuals, engaged in somewhat lonely activities.
This aspect makes the beautiful surroundings overwhelming, and offers
an atmosphere of nostalgic longing.
Tim Eitel's paintings mirror the spectator in his/her position as
a spectator. They show people alone or in groups, with shadowy faces
in profile or with their backs turned. The figurative element is
contrasted by an abstract and structural background. Structurally,
Eitel mixes elements from contemporary architecture with social
activities in institutions and he places his figures in monochrome,
geometric forms. His paintings somehow refer to Caspar David Friedrich's
figures, who also turned their back at the spectator while looking
at sublime nature. Today, the sublime is often put in relation to
art and it is exactly this situation Eitel's figures are placed
in. Eitel presents a series of small paintings with abstracts of
the architecture of a stadium.
The landscapes in David Schnell's paintings show how nature is permeated
by structural interventions, turning the natural environment into
a socio-cultural space. Depicting forests, bridges and roads, his
paintings focus on the architectural forms in nature - or what we
call nature. Built up in grids and using extreme vanishing points,
the paintings are powerful interpretations of man-made nature.
Christoph Ruckhäberle's paintings show figures engaged in social
activities. One of the two paintings in the show is a monumental
representation of a group of three women, turned against the spectator
with a provocative and reserved stare. The other painting shows
people at a summer garden party in the city. Both of them are reminiscences
of classic modernist painting in the way the figures pose and are
organised in the space. Yet, the atmosphere and the expression is
surprisingly disturbing and rather disconcerting.
Matthias Weischer is concerned with the construction of space in
paintings. In this sense, his paintings are meta-paintings as he
focuses on and leads the spectator into the spatial structures of
painting. As the notion of three-dimensional space is established,
Weischer still leaves parts of the canvas two-dimensional. The impressive
painting for this show revolves around the act of painting itself.
We are very happy to show these young German artists in the gallery.
The exhibition as a whole will show a new direction in contemporary
painting and we hope you will find it interesting.
We welcome you in the gallery.
Kind regards
Galleri Nicolai Wallner
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