BERLIN.- Contemporary Fine Arts is presenting the fourth solo exhibition with Gert & Uwe Tobias on the occasion of Gallery Weekend.
The woodcuts from Gert & Uwe Tobias address “not only a set of references that are specific to their makers, but take on the broader history of art, design, visual culture, and the avant-garde. The work is possessed of a polyglot visual literacy, drawing on a dense network of influence and reference, from prehistory and the medieval, to exuberant Dutch florals and hybridized Chinoiserie. It has tackled art history’s prevailing genres – still life, portrait, interior – with aplomb. Figures combine insect, human, bird, and animal parts in a bravura game of Exquisite Corpse, pointing to not only a Surrealist legacy but also the fever dream and chilling nightmare of Hieronymus Bosch”, wrote Sarah Suzuki, curator at the MoMA, New York, in the catalogue published last year on the occasion of their exhibition at the Museum Morsbroich.
The artists celebrate in their recent woodcuts on canvas a new contemporary mannerism with this self-developed technique. The range of influences on their idiosyncratic formal language runs from Christian iconography, through Jugendstil symbolism, to pop art themes. The viewer encounters within their imagery, surreal, narrative approaches, whose relationships are like dream situations that are never completely revealed by the artists. There is barely a recognisable space or time frame suggested in their works. Despite the appearance of non-specific moments from (art history’s) past, any kind of time reference is avoided and the images are nevertheless updated for the present.
The newly appointed Director of the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung in Munich, Dr. Michael Hering, will present new works by Gert & Uwe Tobias in a solo exhibition for his inaugural exhibition at the end of July 2016. Furthermore, the Sprengel Museum in Hanover is preparing an exhibition for the end of September 2016, in which collages by the artists will be presented in dialogue with works from the collection.
