Theo Boettger’s Sneak is bald. With black tongue stretched out venomously and greedily staring bulging eyes, he drools at the thought of his next victim.

Every generation and society has its sneaks, inquisitors, informers, snitches, vilifiers and bullies. Sneaking can happen out of malice, envy and thirst for revenge. It can serve as an outlet for aggression or be motivated by moral convictions or social pressures. Sneaks always sneak on their own group and allow themselves to be used by employers and authorities for checking up on and penalising in-house or system-endangering misdemeanours.

Against a backdrop of global terror and fear of losing one’s job, sneaking is increasingly losing its moral taint. The Internet provides new dimensions in this respect. On websites such as www.verpetzt.de or www.anschwaerzen.de anyone can betray, condemn and insult his or her fellow humans under the cloak of anonymity and in uncensored form. Meanwhile, Süddeutsche Zeitung has introduced a “Sneak and Evaluate” function into its online forum to regulate the daily flood of unqualified reader comments. 

Theo Boettger’s Sneak is joined by other dubious creatures: a neighbour with scarred face contorted in a grimace, pierced eyes and bared teeth; a bloody, battered, bent figure on his nocturnal way home; a tormented heap of flesh stretched out on a kerbstone with the bodiless legs of passers-by trampling indifferently over it.

Scarcely has one tried to relax and create a distance by drawing comparisons with the Expressionist metropolitan art of the 1920s but scraps of words like plus, reopening and big bladder drag you back to the here and now that Johannes Schmidt aptly described as the “pandemonium of modern life on the edge of the abyss.” Boettger paints the uncomfortably commonplace margins of our everyday life in an excessive, aggressive and authentically unattractive style with a great deal of black and blood red and all the less exuberant colours or areas of light. They include a supermarket checkout assistant, her body torn apart by shopping trolleys, extended opening times and screaming kids; a family whose supporting legs begin to totter badly while waiting in the job centre queue; they extend to rampant mass hysteria in the battle for the lowest prices at the Media Markt store opening.

Theo Boettger deals with areas of life of those failed or neglected in capitalism, who surround him daily and affect him personally. He does so with brushstrokes in oil, grotesquely distorted slogans and bulky layers of collage. He translates individual destinies and inferno-like mass battles into psychograms on canvas and wood. Boettger’s painterly realisations may be apocalyptically grim, but the circumstances he describes are perfectly normal everyday madness. His artistic commentary is more personal than political, never other-worldly, but in the midst of life – and close to the abyss.

Carla Orthen

Stefan Kübler

1968 born in Balingen

1994- 1996 Studies Design, FH Anhalt Dessau

1996- 2001 Studies at the \"Hochschule für Bildende Künste Dresden\"

1999 Sokrates/Erasmus scholarship, Glasgow School of Art

2001 Diploma

2001- 2003 \"Meisterschüler\" at Prof. Ralf Kerbach

works and lives in Leipzig 

·Tina Beifuss· 

1977 born in Aalen

1997 – 2002 Studies of liberal arts at the artacademie of Düsseldorf at Klaus Rinke and Georg Herold

2002 – Studies of art therapy at the \"Hochschule für Bildende Künste Dresden\"

·Hannes Broecker· 

1980 born in Eckernförde

seit 2003 Studies at the \"Hochschule für Bildende Künste Dresden\" in the class of Christian Sery

·Nando Kniestedt· 

1977 born in Guben

2006 – 2006 Studies at the \"Hochschule für Bildende Künste Dresden\"

seit 2006 \"Meisterschüler\" at H.-P. Adamski an der \"HfBK Dresden\"

·Daniel Rode·

1971 born in Eutin 

1997 – 2003 artistic co-operation at the University in Greifswald

2002 – 2004 Studies at the \"Hochschule für Bildende Künste Dresden\"

2004 – 2006 \"Meisterschüler\" at Monika Brandmeier at the \"HfBK Dresden\"

·Christian Schönwälder· 

1975 born in Rostock

1996 – 1998 Studies at the \"Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart\"

1998 – 2003 Studies at the \"Hochschule für Bildende Künste Dresden\"

2003 – 2005 \"Meisterschüler\" at Eberhard Bosslet at the \"HfBK Dresden\"

1967 born in Salzburg

1989–1992 Studies of History und Philosophy at the FU Berlin

1996–2001 Studies free art at the \"Hochschule für Bildende Künste Dresden\"

2001–2003 Further studies at Prof. Lutz Dammbeck at the \"HfBK Dresden\"

lives and works in Berlin

1975 born in Nürnberg

1998–2003 Studies Sculpture and other artistic medias at the academy for fine arts Dresden

lives and workes in Dresden and Berlin

Richie Budd

1975 born in Lansing, Michigan (USA)

2000 BFA, University of North Texas, Denton, Texas

2006 MFA, University of Texas at San Antonio, San Antonio, Texas

Working with the surplus of our materially dependent commerce society, Richie Budd reconstitutes ephemera into inventive systems, based on sensory modalities. These systems function on multiple levels, both inert and active, in which the objective is to create a structure of reference which engages the viewer in an active way.

Emily Noelle Lambert

1975 born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (USA)

1995 Antioch College, Comparative European Women’s Studies in London, Berlin, Amsterdam, Krakow and Warsaw

1997 BA Visual Art, Antioch College, Yellow Springs, OH

2007 MFA Painting, Hunter College, New York, NY

Lambert’s work grows intuitively from her personal lexicon of images — hundreds of drawings of figures, places, objects, or situations that she has randomly registered. The artist juxtaposes these images in a surprising and inexplicable manner, in turn imbuing them with context and significance and allowing the viewer to enter in and create their own narrative.

Dana Melamed

1972 born in Tel Aviv (Israel)

1990 Architectural Rendering and Drafting, concentration on Art and Architecture History – Ort Technicum, Givatayim (Israel)

1995 Tel Aviv Art Design Center and Tel Aviv School of Visual Art (Vital) – Fine Art

living in USA since 1999

Melamed uses for her landscapes a collection of current and historical documents, architectural renderings and aerial photographs as source material for her work. The artist uses various construction materials like mesh, plaster, printing waste and scrap metal, dipping them into acrylic paint and glue, scorching the works with a blow torch and cutting into the surface with a razor. She reflects upon destructive forces, the human vulnerability and aggression.

Ryan Schneider

1980 geboren/born in Indianapolis, Indiana (USA)

2001 Studio program at Center for Art and Culture, Aix-en-Provence (France)

2002 Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, Maryland

Schneider\'s painting technique ranges from awkward and crude to surprisingly graceful. His concern with the medium is physical – he thickly layers paint and then scrapes it away with a palette knife, revealing what is beneath the surface. Schneider similarly does this with his characters by layering them into his compositions.

Drawing on found images, his memories and relationships, he constructs environments that formally invite in the viewer.

Dannielle Tegeder

1971 born in Peekskill, New York (USA)

1991 Amsterdam School of Fine Arts (The Netherlands)

1994 BFA, State University of New York at Purchase

1997 MFA, School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Inspired primarily by architectural blueprints and technological sketches, Tegeder creates seemingly abstract environments composed of interconnected recurrent forms. The artist reflects and refers to early 20th century painting and design while at the same time instilling a very personal aesthetic that is ironically evocative of post-modern visions of the future.

Jade Townsend

1977 born in Des Moines, Iowa (USA)

1999 BFA, Iowa State University

2003 MFA, Hunter College, New York

Townsend is concerned with highlighting ironic threads that run throughout American culture. He uses symbolic imagery relating to feelings of apathetic comfort, the marginalized idea of rebellion, and recently, the allegorical relationship between alchemy and the American dream. Using architectural elements, figures, and furniture the artist describes such absurd situations.

This exhibition »we know the smell but not the taste« unifies the positions of seven international artists as belonging to a generation that knows divided Europe more from hearsay than from actual experience, and it makes use of the motive of a »community bulletin board« defying concrete establishment of authorship. As an outgrowth of her own preoccupation with the new history, Stefanie Busch invites her artist friends to exhibit their works concerning the changes in Europe, in particular the breakdown of an entire system. With the distanced relationship this generation has to the political situation of the past, such artistic creations provide direct and indirect testimony in a search for the past and its relics, realities, visions and crimes.

Rarely predetermined, Andreas Hildebrandt’s paintings arise layer by layer, becoming more concrete as they grow within two-dimensional space. The artist’s earlier works showed landscapes shaped by human hands. However, the figure is increasingly disappearing from Hildebrandt’s oeuvre, giving way to a more abstract pictorial language. The artist’s paintings consist of many elements, many of which recur frequently in his work. In the process, some of these disengage themselves from the parent image, becoming pictures within pictures – a vocabulary of forms. 

Hildebrandt’s compositions do not yield to the laws of perspective, nor do they allow a distinction to be drawn between background and foreground. Indeed, a number of elements remain evident beneath multiple layers of paint, while others consist of relief-like, thickly applied structures located next to components that virtually float in their weightlessness or are recognisable only as fragments. As such, Hildebrandt’s style is delicate, clear, and linear at the same time as it is course, expressive, and amorphous. Showing the full range of painterly expression is the prime motivation behind Andreas Hildebrand’s work.