Contemporary Fine Arts

Ralf Ziervogel

03 Jan - 04 Feb 2012

© Ralf Ziervogel
ARE II, 2011
ink on paper
324 x 151 cm / 127.56 x 59.45"
RALF ZIERVOGEL
3 January - 4 February, 2012

Contemporary Fine Arts is pleased to present for the first time a solo exhibition with new drawings by Ralf Ziervogel (*1975).

Ralf Ziervogel, who studied at the Berlin University of the Arts with Lothar Baumgarten, is known for his delicate and complex ink drawings predominantly showing human bodies which in monochrome ornamental nettings proliferate lengths of paper with meticulous precision.
In this exhibition, Ralf Ziervogel’s new ”declensions of the body“ are characterised by a change from smaller to life-sized bodies. Adopted to the gallery space and concept, the artist transfers his fine and extensive drawings onto paper with large widths of up to five metres. Primarily male human bodies are caught in extreme physical situations from which they cannot escape. They are enchained, entangled and knotted. However, Ralf Ziervogel’s works are and show more than only morbid inventions of violence. As Dominikus Müller points out in ”Every Adidas Got Its Story“, it is the theme of ”coupling and uncoupling; of interlinking and dissolving“ as well as the question of stretchability of things as much as of reality.
Ralf Ziervogel draws his figures in his hand’s sphere of action and develops the spacious sceneries in classical ink technique step-by-step during the operating procedure without any tracing. Thus, in delicately drawn chains, one body is tied to another, limbs are bound together and destroyed so that the twisted figures and settings are gradually growing. From a distance however, the detailed and amorphous abysses become ornamental patterns in which there seems to be no beginning and no ending. The large format Ziervogel is operating with in this exhibition favours this through the distanced perspective the spectator needs to take when faced with the height and length of the individual sheets. The beholder is located in a Petri dish of the drawing rather then just in front of it. In the large format, the potential of the graphic medium is proved just as the interplay with close and distant view.
 

Tags: Lothar Baumgarten, Dominikus Müller, Ralf Ziervogel