DUSSELDORF.- With Compilation IV, the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf continues the young exhibition series initiated in 2003. The title points to the compilation and interplay of artistic positions that are thematically related or close in genre. After focusing successively on photography, film and video (2003), sculpture and installations (2005) and painting (2007), Compilation IV brings together artists of the younger generation who work in the media of drawing and collage.

In recent years, drawing has again become popular, reflected in a many-faceted concern with the possibilities and techniques it offers. The exhibition will present a broad spectrum of modes of expression, from comic-style series and text-image dialogues to drawing as investigation of memory and perception and as an archiving technique, from extensive paper objects and silhouettes, erased and overdrawn newspaper pictures to animated and collage films. One basic trend common to the works is a proclivity for narrative, for the imaginative and fictional.

Participating artists: Sandra Böschenstein, Jürgen von Dückerhoff, Christine Gensheimer, Katie Holten, Christian Holstad, Monica Ursina Jäger, Matthias Reinhold, Nadja Schöllhammer, Mungo Thomson,

Sandra Boeschenstein (*1967 in Zurich, lives and works in Zurich) uses pencil, felt tip pen, stamped oil paint, ink, and threads for her drawings. She takes everyday objects like food, furniture, or optical equipment out of their accustomed context, generating an absurd question and answer game in dialogues of picture and text.

Jürgen von Dückerhoff (*1973 in Keeken/Niederrhein, lives and works in Hamburg) has developed a special process of visual creation. He bases his works on pictorial material, for instance from picture books or magazines, which he processes manually by partial removing layers of colour with an eraser. The partly erased, partly recognisable subject matter is thus transformed into suggestive, new pictures.

Christine Gensheimer (*1976 in Frankfurt am Main, lives and works in Leipzig) works in pencil and coloured crayon drawings, watercolours, painted-over polaroids, animated collages, and hand-drawn films. She mixes situations from everyday life with gentle wit, self-irony, and melancholy. Her figures and scenarios tell droll little stories that deal with forms of personal and social isolation.

Christian Holstad (*1972 in Anaheim/California, lives and works in New York) is drawer, performer, tailor, and decorator. The innumerable illustrations and objects that he comes across in picture libraries, old magazines, and on Ebay constitute the narrative and material subject matter for his diverting collage series. He combines everyday consumer goods and motifs from the mass media with clichés about homosexuality, pornography, and violence, thus reflecting on societal conventions.

Katie Holten (*1975 in Dublin, lives and works in New York) addresses the transience and fragility of nature in her works. She draws world maps from memory, depicts series of American tree species, and models trees out of paper and black ink. Her artistic work includes drawings and installations, as well as public projects.

Monica Ursina Jäger (*1974 in Thalwil, lives and works in London) composes naturalistic landscapes and fragments of the urban environment into surreal, dreamlike scenes in her ink drawings. Her installations, too, play with the seeming reality of found pictures. She engraves schematic scenes into monitor picture tubes that emerge out of the dark like fragments of memory.

Matthias Reinhold (*1978 in Dietenheim, lives and works in Stuttgart) has designed his fine, accurate pencil drawings as a sort of encyclopaedic picture dictionary, repeatedly creating new combinations of pictures and concepts from its component parts. In his current works, he produces large format collages by manual and digital means, whose contents have to be worked out like picture puzzles.

Nadja Schöllhammer (*1971 in Esslingen, lives and works in Berlin) makes rampant, extensive installations out of paper, silhouettes, ink drawings, burn-ins, and collages. She interweaves real pictures – encounters, pairs or groups, mythical figures and nightmarish visions, quotes from art history or the media – with abstract forms into labyrinthine structures in space.

Mungo Thomson (*1969 in Davis/California, lives and works in Los Angeles and Berlin) draws comic series inspired by his own extensive collection of comics from all around the world. In copying, however, he leaves out all figures and indications of their existence. He concentrates on scenes of destroyed cities, abandoned workplaces, and pictures of the universe that open up new associative spaces for every viewer.