Dark, faceless figures, a bawling infant in a stroller, the companylogos of cheap discount stores, banker types, angrypeople with tattoos, zombies with wrinkled faces and emptyeye sockets, stumbling people, falling people, people sweptaway, crumbling houses, shreds of words, fragments ofpeople, lots of black and little colour - Theo Boettger createsa pandemonium of modern life on the brink of the abyssin his large-format watercolours. As an artist, he deals withtopics in everyday life by pitting himself against the demoralisingdetails of social inequities, the impertinence of themedia, and hopeless human fates.In his pictures, he addresses exclusion, life balanced in themargins and condemned there to desperation, explosion,and failure. Black holes and spiral forms that have been incorporatedinto the collage, bursts of black colour emanatingfrom fierce brush strokes, chaotic compositions of simultaneousactions - all of these endow the realistic elements inthe images with even greater intensity.The artist eschews banal descriptions in his images, interruptinghis narratives with symbols and commentariescomprised of word fragments, as if to slow down the viewer'sobservations by requiring a large amount of time for decoding.For there is, in principle, nothing written in thesepaintings that could not also be seen. Where people act like the black-and-white characters in a comic strip, one personcan be exchanged for the other; the stories in the speechbubbles become a parallel reality that functions as a spark forthe painterly discovery of form.For Theo Boettger, codification does not mean disguisingfacts. Even though many story sequences are given only infragments, a mood of grim critique always pierces through allfilters of artistic alienation. Distance and identification seemto have congealed into a constant state of fierce struggle withone another. The artist does not allow himself the cool distanceof an analyst, nor does he deliver a plain and simple sociocriticalevaluation of the situation. His images derive theirclarity from the topicality of their subjects and their deepseriousness, even though this seriousness also overfiows,now and then, into hopeless gloom. Theo Boettger takesadvantage of only a fraction of the potential of the mediumin his watercolours, but he does so intentionally, reducing hisworks to a few primary tones without any decorative smearsor fiowing colour gradients.Simplicity of form is the goal; formal disquietude correspondsto an authentic sense of agitation. The remnants ofthe artist's presence in the paintings - moist waves and blemishes,drips of paint, black blots - attest to the intensity ofthe process of creation and appear as marks of desecrationon the once - white paper. There is more than formal coquetrywith brutishness, fury, and rebelliousness resonatingin these paintings. Indeed, the interspersed words outline the path of a diffuse, cognitive march; yet they remain mereintimations that never run the risk of congealing into slogans.Like echoes, these words refer back to the fragmentary natureof modern worlds of signs.Artistic examinations of acute situations in society by meansof street observations have a rich historical tradition.The high point of this tradition was, arguably, the urbanpainting of Expressionism and Critical Realism in the 1920's,which often derived the arc of tension in their narratives byjuxtaposing the rich and the poor, the seemingly limitlesspossibilities for amusement in the city and the melancholyof the individual in the crowd. It is possible to draw a directcomparison between Theo Boettger's paintings and thesetraditions. Nevertheless, these works are missing the "lighterside" almost completely, as if one had taken down all of theradiant facades of the city, leaving behind only the featurelessquagmire of humanity in its bowels. The artist turns hisattention to the darkened realms, the splatter scene that iseveryday existence. Yet he does not do so with meticulousdescriptions and objective statistics. Rather, he uses imagesto speak the language of what he represents. Boettger is gruffand sarcastic, but never distant.
(Text by Johannes Schmidt)
Solo Exhibitions (selection) | |
2013 | »RISE«, galerie baer, Dresden |
2011 | »Das Orakel«, Kunstverein Wolfsburg |
2010 | »Point of no return«, galerie baer, Dresden |
Participations (selection) | |
2013 | »jetzt hier«, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Dresden |
2012 | »Apokalypse Utopie«, Galerie Pankow, Berlin (C) »Kontrollverlust«, Kunsthaus Erfurt »Kunst-Kunst. Von hier aus betrachtet«, GfZK Leipzig »l´oiseau présente... «, Ballhaus Ost, Berlin |
2011 | »galerie modul 3«, Keller Hauptstraße 1, Colorado, Dresden »Theo Boettger, Hannes Broecker, Eckehard Fuchs, Andreas Hildebrandt«, galerie baer, Dresden »Positionen Sächsischer Gegenwartskunst«, Villa Eschebach, Dresden »Dialoge – X. Biennale der Gegenwartskunst«, St. Petersburg, Russland |
Vita | |
1975 | born in Meißen, Germany |
1996-2001 | studied fine arts at the Academy of Fine Arts Dresden, Germany |
2001-2003 | master studies with Prof. Hans Peter Adamski at the Academy of Fine Arts Dresden, Germany |
lives and works in Berlin, Germany | |
Prizes | |
2006 | New Talents at the Art Cologne, Köln, Germany |
2005 | Grant by Käthe Dorsch Foundation, Berlin, Germany |
2004 | Residency scholarship by Kulturstiftung of Saxony (Schloss Wiepersdorf), Germany |
2003 | travel scholarship, Moskow, Russia |
2002 | New York scholarship by the German National Acadamic Foundation Hegenbarth Fellowship for the project »No more heroes« |
2000 | Scholarship Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes |
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