In this exhibition, the Rüdiger Schöttle Gallery showed the works of three young artists displaying completely different approaches: the painter Kim Nekarda (b. 1973, Giessen/Germany), the sculptor Johan Zetterquist (b. 1968, Arvika/Sweden), both now living and working in Berlin, and the Czech painter Jakub Hosek (b.1979, Prague/Czech Republic). The works of the Swedish sculptor Johan Zetterquist occupy whole rooms. No materials and no techniques are unknown to him as means of artistic expression: sculptural objects, installations, photographs, video, sound, drawings and wall paintings – all of them form part of his repertoire. Zetterquist's worlds seem at once familiar and strange. The artist maintains that the human being cannot make anything artificial. No matter what we make or do, no matter how much we augment or embellish reality, no matter what we invent – it is all real. Since graduating from the Valand Academy of Fine Arts in Gothenburg in 1994, Zetterquist has been exhibiting his works in numerous group and solo exhibitions. His first large solo exhibition took place at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin in 2003. For the exhibition room on the ground floor of the Rüdiger Schöttle Gallery, Johan Zetterquist has combined sculpture and wall painting into a spatially dynamic installation. Central to the installation is the sculpture "S&M Tower of Power, 2003. A tower solution for cities lacking a good suicide spot and a car friendly vantage point". Like an architectural model never realized, the tower now stands in the room as an art object. The almost abstract representation of the tiny city at the foot of the tower forms a stark contrast with the observation platform on the roof of the carpark tower.
The paintings of Kim Nekarda, who studied at the Munich Art Academy from 1999 until 2003, are produced by a process which is best described as reversed collage: the individual parts are "pasted" together in Photoshop, blown up onto a huge canvas by means of an overhead projector and then captured on the canvas with the traditional painting media of brush and paint. Differences of representation and material arise from the changes in source material from one collaged layer to the next, ranging from the "trivial" arts of the comic strip and the cartoon film to painting and the traditional Japanese woodcut.
Nekarda plays with the expectations and fantasies of the viewer. His paintings are devoid of people but nevertheless have a basic narrative structure which clearly differentiates them from traditional landscapes and interiors. The actual narrative, whether past, present or future, takes place somewhere beyond the picture frame. Only tiny traces, the remains of a past moment of reality, loosely strewn within the painting like clues at the scene of a crime, hint at a happening or a story, but without fully disclosing its content.The youngest of the three artists, Jakub Hosek, born in Prague in 1979, graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague in 1998. Following group exhibitions in a great many venues, including Prague, London and Paris, Hosek's paintings were exhibited during Open Art at the Rathausgalerie in Munich. He is a member of the Prague artists' collective A.M.180, which publishes independent music from the Czech Republic and abroad, organizes concerts, film projects and exhibitions and has its own music TV programme. It is precisely this spirit of post-teenage Pop which informs Hosak's strongly coloured and, through its collage-like comic elements, deliberately naïve painting – stylish, cool and technically perfect. Over the years, Hosek has developed various methods of working. He began by cutting out sticker motifs and overpainting them on canvas. Later he combined stylized images of houses and landscapes with lyrical fragments from French chansons. His imagery today borders on totally abstract compositions as modern, pastel-coloured paraphrases of Surrealism.
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