Malte Zenses
30 Oct - 17 Dec 2015
© Malte Zenses
I love u dance, 2015, kinetic sculpture, chi master, roof battens and camouflage skateboard griptape, approx. 30 x 240 x 80 cm / #gal, 2015, neon light, 32 x 13 cm
I love u dance, 2015, kinetic sculpture, chi master, roof battens and camouflage skateboard griptape, approx. 30 x 240 x 80 cm / #gal, 2015, neon light, 32 x 13 cm
MALTE ZENSES
Pais, Krikrika & Fofi
30 October - 17 December 2015
With ironic nonchalance, Malte Zenses' paintings and sculptures expand the vocabulary of abstract painting and new realism by pointedly integrating the zeitgeist of his generation through autobiographical fragments.
Letterings and characters play with the graffiti scene's idea of leaving quick notes or tags, but they are precisely placed and become ciphers of autobiographic experiences lying behind what is visible. What appear as abstract lines in works such as "Untitled", "Die neue Freiheit" or "things are hard, but post-modern" are in fact Malte Zenses’ travel routes, the "drawings" of which he samples from Google Maps. In the diptych "way to fast for a star", the line corresponds with his trip from New York to the Catskill Mountains. Other elements like the applied napkin in the painting “My Friend” are also ciphers of autobiographic stories. The broken object "fast times" shows the screen shot of a film that Malte Zenses made from a train on his journey from the Pacific to the Atlantic, with the title alluding to both the eponymous 1982 teeny movie featuring Sean Penn and Nicolas Cage and a broken love. The painting "Fliehender Tisch und Fatale Architektur" is an encoded homage to his parental home, and “Das Auge der Katze” unsuspectingly leads the viewer to the psychological depths of Georges Bataille’s “Story of the Eye”.
Malte Zenses’ sculptures continue this quite natural dissolution of familiar formal boundaries; they can be described from several perspectives as a “dance around one’s center”, both in a personal respect and in regard to the identity as an artist.
The neon lettering “#gal” displays a hashtag from the Ragga dance scene that uses “gal” as a playful word, vacillating between respect and snideness, for a “girl” who can dance well. This is juxtaposed with the installation “I love you dance”, two roof battens set in rhythmic motion by a foot massage device, rubbing back and forth over a skateboard grip tape that is worn off over time.
The sculpture “Der rauchende Ryan”, the cast of a Levis 501 and Reebok shoes, literally fixes in place the “uniform” of a befriended artist and thus becomes a portrait. In a complex manner, Malte Zenses’ works play with the déjà vu of familiar things and allow the view to “enter the image” via formal and autobiographic codifications. Like Pais, Krikrika & Fofi, the invisible friends of a friend from childhood days, Malte Zenses’ works become figures whose messages are individually formulated.
Malte Zenses (DE 1987) lives in Frankfurt and Cologne. Since 2014 he has been studying at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under Andreas Schulze. He previously studied at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Offenbach under Wolfgang Luy from 2010 to 2013. Since the beginning of his studies, Malte Zenses has exhibited in projects in Cologne, Hamburg, Lucerne, Los Angeles, Nuremberg, and New York.
Pais, Krikrika & Fofi
30 October - 17 December 2015
With ironic nonchalance, Malte Zenses' paintings and sculptures expand the vocabulary of abstract painting and new realism by pointedly integrating the zeitgeist of his generation through autobiographical fragments.
Letterings and characters play with the graffiti scene's idea of leaving quick notes or tags, but they are precisely placed and become ciphers of autobiographic experiences lying behind what is visible. What appear as abstract lines in works such as "Untitled", "Die neue Freiheit" or "things are hard, but post-modern" are in fact Malte Zenses’ travel routes, the "drawings" of which he samples from Google Maps. In the diptych "way to fast for a star", the line corresponds with his trip from New York to the Catskill Mountains. Other elements like the applied napkin in the painting “My Friend” are also ciphers of autobiographic stories. The broken object "fast times" shows the screen shot of a film that Malte Zenses made from a train on his journey from the Pacific to the Atlantic, with the title alluding to both the eponymous 1982 teeny movie featuring Sean Penn and Nicolas Cage and a broken love. The painting "Fliehender Tisch und Fatale Architektur" is an encoded homage to his parental home, and “Das Auge der Katze” unsuspectingly leads the viewer to the psychological depths of Georges Bataille’s “Story of the Eye”.
Malte Zenses’ sculptures continue this quite natural dissolution of familiar formal boundaries; they can be described from several perspectives as a “dance around one’s center”, both in a personal respect and in regard to the identity as an artist.
The neon lettering “#gal” displays a hashtag from the Ragga dance scene that uses “gal” as a playful word, vacillating between respect and snideness, for a “girl” who can dance well. This is juxtaposed with the installation “I love you dance”, two roof battens set in rhythmic motion by a foot massage device, rubbing back and forth over a skateboard grip tape that is worn off over time.
The sculpture “Der rauchende Ryan”, the cast of a Levis 501 and Reebok shoes, literally fixes in place the “uniform” of a befriended artist and thus becomes a portrait. In a complex manner, Malte Zenses’ works play with the déjà vu of familiar things and allow the view to “enter the image” via formal and autobiographic codifications. Like Pais, Krikrika & Fofi, the invisible friends of a friend from childhood days, Malte Zenses’ works become figures whose messages are individually formulated.
Malte Zenses (DE 1987) lives in Frankfurt and Cologne. Since 2014 he has been studying at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under Andreas Schulze. He previously studied at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Offenbach under Wolfgang Luy from 2010 to 2013. Since the beginning of his studies, Malte Zenses has exhibited in projects in Cologne, Hamburg, Lucerne, Los Angeles, Nuremberg, and New York.