Roland Boden
29 May - 21 Jun 2015
ROLAND BODEN
Strategien der Defensive - Images and objects
29 May - 21 June 2015
Roland Boden’s works are based on 3-D architectural models, which are created at the computer and function as rough perspective sketches. The foundation to these models are comprehensive collections containing the artist’s own photo series, supplemented by material from various media and film stills. These shots of largely interchangeable urban peripheral areas and suburbs – demolition sites and wastelands, investment ruins, components of military architecture or decaying concrete clusters from the 1960s – function as modular construction kits with which to generate fictional urban landscapes. The “urban remainder areas” created in this way create references to 20th-century avant-garde utopias and designs of “total architecture” but also to fiction in computer games and cyberspace. Layers of cells, vertical grids and opened-out core structures form tectonic bodies, persisting between construction and demolition, the expression of a modernism that brought its own failure along with it. The painterly realisation leads inevitably to an analogue lack of clarity, lending a used impression to the surfaces that cannot be created digitally. Parallel to this, Boden produces series of images and drawings based on raster structures, patterns, cipher codes and encoded tables: surfaces that once served as society’s information carriers, whose readability is no longer possible due to encoding, alienation or overlay – white noise of the information society.
Roland Boden *1962 in Dresden, lives and works in Berlin.
Strategien der Defensive - Images and objects
29 May - 21 June 2015
Roland Boden’s works are based on 3-D architectural models, which are created at the computer and function as rough perspective sketches. The foundation to these models are comprehensive collections containing the artist’s own photo series, supplemented by material from various media and film stills. These shots of largely interchangeable urban peripheral areas and suburbs – demolition sites and wastelands, investment ruins, components of military architecture or decaying concrete clusters from the 1960s – function as modular construction kits with which to generate fictional urban landscapes. The “urban remainder areas” created in this way create references to 20th-century avant-garde utopias and designs of “total architecture” but also to fiction in computer games and cyberspace. Layers of cells, vertical grids and opened-out core structures form tectonic bodies, persisting between construction and demolition, the expression of a modernism that brought its own failure along with it. The painterly realisation leads inevitably to an analogue lack of clarity, lending a used impression to the surfaces that cannot be created digitally. Parallel to this, Boden produces series of images and drawings based on raster structures, patterns, cipher codes and encoded tables: surfaces that once served as society’s information carriers, whose readability is no longer possible due to encoding, alienation or overlay – white noise of the information society.
Roland Boden *1962 in Dresden, lives and works in Berlin.