MUNICH.- Exuberant fantasy, subtle lightness and humorous profundity distinguish the large-format woodcuts, luminous collages, and delicately nuanced typewriter drawings of Gert & Uwe Tobias. The artist duo has ranked internationally among the best-known German graphic artists for over a decade. Their pictorial worlds consistently cause a stir in the realm of contemporary art. To this day their inimitable signature style blurs the boundaries between “high-” and “low-brow” in contemporary art in an unprecedented manner and has lost nothing of its radicalism and consistency.
Their most recent group of works, GRISAILLE, also holds true to the promise of the artists’ reputation. With this exhibition project, exclusively created for their Munich debut in the
Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Gert & Uwe Tobias rediscover the centuries-old technique of grisaille painting and repeatedly sound out new and unconventional possibilities of the technique in diverse groups of artworks in a variety of ways. Throughout these works grey takes on a special position in the colour palette.
To master this technique requires a high level of confidence and a precise understanding of their own artistic resources. It comes as no coincidence that the Tobias brothers have the courage to take on this new challenge with all the risks it entails at the height of their subtle sensitivity for colour. The GRISAILLE series simultaneously signifies for the brothers a moment to pause in their artistic trajectory, and it will become apparent that the withdrawal of colour from their pictorial worlds allows aspects of motif and concept to meld into a new form of unity.
A suite of large-scale “window-pictures” forms the centre of their investigation into grey. In these works the artists creatively and brilliantly experiment with complex spatial representations and changes of perspective in the essentially two-dimensional medium of the woodcut. Alongside these pictures Gert & Uwe Tobias will for the first time present large-scale clay sculptures, placed in front of an extensive wall drawing created for the Munich exhibition. The interplay between these sculptures and the gesturally charged wall drawing provides an image of the mysteriousness and aloofness of grisaille painting, qualities that almost inevitably accompany this technique. In the monochrome twilight, previously unknown in the Tobias brothers’ work, the fantastical pictorial inventions unfurled in collages and drawings not only gain a new ambiguity, but also open up a magical shadow realm never yet entered from this angle.
With the curatorial idea to commission a suite of works specifically for the Graphische Sammlung for the exhibition Gert & Uwe Tobias GRISAILLE, the centuries-old collection not only continues its consistently strong engagement for contemporary art, but also breaks new ground, entering virtually unexplored paths in the artistic present of the 21st century.
Curator: Dr. Michael Hering
