Viewing the works of Peter K. Koch an artistic strategy becomes visible by which he looks for the frontiers between painting and sculpture. The works illustrate Peter K. Koch’s interest for the inseparable connection between form and content, the meaning of colour and the relation of surface and space. He uses varying principles of geometrical abstraction, deconstruction and artistic conversion of materialistic singularities in order to create a closed self-referential form only. The colour fields that are slightly accumulated on the edges escape the surface and give a hint that an image by Peter K. Koch can be a sculpture at the same time, gaining volume and capturing space. Whilst the artist formerly executed the dissolution of the pictorial space via purely pictorial means and thus illusionary, his new works address the transition themselves and thus also physically operate at the boundary between surface and space.

Philipp Gloger views his works as an »overview of complexity – as a complexity« and indeed the motifs he gathers from urban spaces, the world of sports and technology seem like a structured chaos. An interlocking of pictorial spaces populated by a jungle of figures whereas there is a system at a closer look an overkill of information that discloses episodes in its detail. The world as a machine, stopped in order to uncover a casual, elusive moment hence the viewer is looking for an arm to mobilise it again. 

In Gloger’s images social criticism is mirrored since it is nowadays not possible anymore to be restricted to one piece of information, never mind receiving it. The artist develops also visionary notions for example in his architectural images by proposals for a »more effective« way of building and living.

In his images Ronald de Bloeme is using the familiar sign systems of modern society and deprives it of its original function. Declining the convention of industrial design, form follows function, Bloeme wipes away the function and lets form and function only appear as an aesthetic communication.
Laminar bars and form superimpose thereby the background and refuse us the view of that what we claim to be the actual content.
As a basis for the monumental triptych »New Reading« serves the motif of a billboard. At first this billboard is deconstructed, shifted and distorted by de Bloeme by computer before it experiences further alienation when put onto canvas. The written information is erased by bars that are exempted and varnished in glossy black whereas the view on the actual image object is unblocked partially.
The change between mat and glossy surfaces is of major importance for the authenticity of the works of Ronald de Bloeme. The consistent coating of varnish suggests an industrial fabrication, polish, missing edges and contorted forms again stage the individual character and damask the apparent perfection and reproduction.

 Stefan Lenke’s non-objective abstract works often have their origin in an authentic experience: architecture, whereas space and light are translated into colour fields and geometrical forms, electronic music that influences Lenke via its rhythm, breaks and repeats, life in metropolises where hectic and dynamic of artists communicates between pending and falling forms, between hard colour contrasts and between the coexistence of drawn together and transparent colour fields.In his new works the moment of fleetingness plays a major role. Also seen as an exaggeration of the dynamic moment, many paintings now show a field or a corner with just one quick stroke of paint on top of the primer.Mainly his works on wooden boards and paper remind of tarnished window glasses whereas one brushes over quickly with one hand or a sleeve and sees fragments of the world lying behind before they draw together again. 

At the opening of the Olympic winter games in Sotchi the technology failed. At the fifth ring the stylized snow flake, a sparkling star, did not open as a ring.

The interest of the artist Sebastian Hempel was not provoked by the thus aligned political explosiveness since the fifth ring was meant to represent the USA but by the idea itself and the technical refinement. 

Hempel’s moved and light-kinetic objects and installations are always a combination of special material, physical laws, formal strength and reduced inserted playfulness. With his work of the Olympic ring »Putins Stern« the artist built an object from a real example for the first time. 10.000 illuminating diodes enable this work with a diameter of 2,70 m to »draw« a star and ring form.

 But also the other new objects draw patterns with moving magnets, with floating glitter into the plasma structures and rotating LEDs graphic forms. And together with light sensors one can even project one’s own self-image onto an object.

Jonas Lewek is playing with our expectations. 

With subtle means the artist enables us to question a priori placed ideas and assumed truths. 

In the exhibition »Uniform« Lewek shows, amongst others, five national flags in which the artist has replaced colours by shades of grey. Flag remains flag but the lacking of the national colours make them »uniform« and turn them to formal unsubstantial fragments. The correlative relation between form and content is also the idea of the work »Zeichen«. Countless images of geometrical basic forms from general and special usage are put into a system of parity by Lewek and are questioning the boundaries between profound symbolic and profane banality. The star caters as a national emblem, as a symbol of a religion, a political ideology, as a company logo or as a form in nature. Like neutral evidences Jonas Lewek lines up the images and leaves the works to the viewer for a very own, subjective interpretation.

The cityscapes of Eric Keller painted on wooden plates seem timeless. An undercooled film set, a different world, in which the few protagonists seem to be as inflexible as in film stills. Indeed Eric Keller’s images speak of anonymity, loneliness, the lack of communication and isolation. The cityscapes announce the sheer absence of human beings as if the world stands still. The strange, the aloofness, the eerie is underlined by the artist via the used pallet of colours. Put onto large surfaces, the earthy colours communicate from further away a supposed idyll, at a closer glance the colours seem to hide behind a fogbank. The eye is guided quickly towards a small but loud field of magenta or neon green, colours that are unnatural and thus make the viewer shiver. Nevertheless the depicted situations take hold oft he viewer and make him or her quiz why one cannot and does not want to escape this artificial world anymore. 

Max Aschenbach, Grit Aulitzky, Jan Brokof, Stefanie Busch, Tony Franz, Ella Görner, Tesa Hammerstedt-Grünberg, Michael Klipphahn, Stefan Krauth, Moritz Liebig, Roswitha Maul, Robert Pappermann, Stephan Ruderisch, Robert Vanis, Mikka Wellner, Silke Wobst

Hardly any other media generates authenticity in the way photography does. The suggestion of truthfulness and our trust leave a large scope of manipulation to the medium of photography. Stefan Krauth’s works are staged manipulations. Original, mainly documentary photographs taken while traveling, experience an artistic editing as primary material. Motivic elements of the image are being retouched or mounted, changed through analogue interferences such as exterior lighting and afterwards re-taken from the monitor, sometimes even several times. The monitor grid, screen reflections, dust particles and smoke distance the depicted and transfer reality into fiction. Stefan Krauth uses those faults as a pictorial moment. In connection to the sometimes bizarre manipulations, his images develop a somehow deep lyrical and narrative context, that is again escalated by the titles. In the beginning the artist was aiming at creating clichés out of real motifs, now the romantically arcane gains more significance in his image narrations. The human is only anonymously depicted, mostly from behind or from a distance; any hints to concrete places have been eliminated from the image. While watching the awareness remains, that those images are constructed but still at the same time one is tempted to make this fiction plausible.

In Zusammenarbeit mit der Grafikwerkstatt Dresden, der Hochschule für Bildende Künste Dresden und dem Kupferstich-Kabinett Dresden schrieb die Landeshauptstadt Dresden die Teilnahme an einem Workshop aus.

Die Ergebnisse dieses Workshops werden in der galerie baer präsentiert.

Paul Barsch · Theo Boettger · Jan Brokof · Stefanie Busch · Ayelen Coccoz · Constanze Deutsch · Ludwig P. Flohe · Rao Fu · Philipp Gloger · Carolin Israel · Marc Jung · Eric Keller · Marten Kirbach · Andrey Klassen · Stefan Krauth · Stefan Lenke · Moritz Liebig · Robert Pappermann · Nadja Poppe · Johanna Rüggen · Suntje Sagerer · Anna Schapiro · Diana Wehmeier · Toni Winkler