Florian Baudrexel / Tobias Hantmann
07 Mar - 11 Apr 2009
FLORIAN BAUDREXEL / TOBIAS HANTMANN
07th March - 11th April 2009
Florian Baudrexel creates large format reliefs, large scale installations and sculptures from materials which he finds such as cardboard, Styrofoam and remnants of posters, and transforms these into abstract compositions which despite all of their freshness, look as though they want to bring the art of a forgotten past back to life...
As contemporary as they may look, his small-format collages made from colourful advertising leaflets also demonstrate a discourse with traditional questions such as composition, style and reception. Baudrexel’s aspiration is to drive the search for form forward, so that the modern abstract vocabulary doesn’t stay caught in a cliché, but becomes a fluid language and enters into the present. The utopian aspiration of this interpretation of form, that the content isn’t something to which the form must be added, but that it can simply be itself – as an expression – comes across in the highly visible, ‘low grade’, contemporary materials.
In the exhibition at Bernd Kugler Gallery, Florian Baudrexel will combine a new large scale relief with a series of new collages which are arranged in a wall formation.
Tobias Hantmann has been working with the kind of velour carpets available in the high street of differing format for some years, on which he embosses structures with the most simple of tools. In his latest work, we see ourselves confronted by ephemeral pictures which, in terms of their form, connect with cubism or classic still life painting. Due to their indexical character, the arrangements by Hantmann clearly follow the trail of something we’ve seen before – namely the trailblazing activity of the artist – and yet at the same time alternate between artistic gesture and photographic presentation. This is because they refer to the trail of an activity which is immediately stamped by its appearance, only, however to be able to subjectively present us with the worlds of images composed using this indexical trail.
A group of three dimensional works proves to have just as much a double meaning as the carpets. Here, in a trompe-l’oeil procedure, we see Hantmann exactly emulating the reflective and shiny bases of a set of cooking pots. The pots captured in this way are then mounted at ground level so that they almost look like they are floating. Initially arranged in groups, Hantmann moves his ‘sculptures’ across into a visual paradigm, however, by photographing them from a raised visual platform. These exposures, which are to a greater or lesser degree spatially reduced, either complement or counteract the existence of the actual objects in the exhibition room.
07th March - 11th April 2009
Florian Baudrexel creates large format reliefs, large scale installations and sculptures from materials which he finds such as cardboard, Styrofoam and remnants of posters, and transforms these into abstract compositions which despite all of their freshness, look as though they want to bring the art of a forgotten past back to life...
As contemporary as they may look, his small-format collages made from colourful advertising leaflets also demonstrate a discourse with traditional questions such as composition, style and reception. Baudrexel’s aspiration is to drive the search for form forward, so that the modern abstract vocabulary doesn’t stay caught in a cliché, but becomes a fluid language and enters into the present. The utopian aspiration of this interpretation of form, that the content isn’t something to which the form must be added, but that it can simply be itself – as an expression – comes across in the highly visible, ‘low grade’, contemporary materials.
In the exhibition at Bernd Kugler Gallery, Florian Baudrexel will combine a new large scale relief with a series of new collages which are arranged in a wall formation.
Tobias Hantmann has been working with the kind of velour carpets available in the high street of differing format for some years, on which he embosses structures with the most simple of tools. In his latest work, we see ourselves confronted by ephemeral pictures which, in terms of their form, connect with cubism or classic still life painting. Due to their indexical character, the arrangements by Hantmann clearly follow the trail of something we’ve seen before – namely the trailblazing activity of the artist – and yet at the same time alternate between artistic gesture and photographic presentation. This is because they refer to the trail of an activity which is immediately stamped by its appearance, only, however to be able to subjectively present us with the worlds of images composed using this indexical trail.
A group of three dimensional works proves to have just as much a double meaning as the carpets. Here, in a trompe-l’oeil procedure, we see Hantmann exactly emulating the reflective and shiny bases of a set of cooking pots. The pots captured in this way are then mounted at ground level so that they almost look like they are floating. Initially arranged in groups, Hantmann moves his ‘sculptures’ across into a visual paradigm, however, by photographing them from a raised visual platform. These exposures, which are to a greater or lesser degree spatially reduced, either complement or counteract the existence of the actual objects in the exhibition room.