BERLIN.- Galerie Michael Janssen presents new works by Christof Mascher. Alley Cat is the second solo exhibition of the artist in the gallery. Born in Hanover in 1979, he studied at the College of Fine Arts in Braunschweig with Walter Dahn until 2009. On display are new works on wood, drawings on paper and a shadow play installation.
His paintings and drawings are characterized by contradictions and ruptures. Fully painted elements stand next to unfinished ones, the gestural next to the ornamental and the abstract next to the representational. Ethereal remains of landscapes are either still under construction or already threatened by destruction. Mascher works on visual worlds in which nothing seems to make sense and therefore are open to all possibilities. Mascher processes influences from different sources; he is influenced by popular culture, such as scenarios from adventure games from the late 1980s, as well as by painters like Hieronymus Bosch, Pieter Breughel, Edvard Munch, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Phillip Guston. The architectural elements are partly alluding to old cartoons, expressionist silent films as The Cabinet of Dr.Caligari (1920) and Defa films from the 1970’s like The Black Mill (1975).
Mascher paints on unusual surfaces, such as old Formica tables, copper plates and found pieces of wood. The works range from miniature to large sizes and have partially a dull, glazed surface, applied almost transparent or are thickly coated and have a shiny shellac finish.
Christof Mascher was born in 1979 in Hannover, and lives and works in Braunschweig, Germany. In the past few years he has had solo museum shows at Galerie der Stadt Remscheid, and at the Museum for Modern Art, Goslar. Gallery exhibitions include Fake Empire at The Happy Lion, LA in 2008, and The Ghost Yard at Galerie Michael Janssen, Cologne in 2007. In late 2009, Mascher participated in group shows at the Nunnery Gallery, London and Salon Schmitz, Cologne. He was taught at the Hochschule für bildende Künste (HBK), Braunschweig, under Professor Walter Dahn.
