This show was selected as part of Berlin Oomph powered by Hallen 05—a curated roundup of the best contemporary art exhibitions and events held by galleries, museums, and institutions in town during Hallen 05, September 2024.
“chemical,” Matthias Groebel’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. This exhibition marks the debut presentation of a rare body of work made in the late 1980s, leading up to his widely acclaimed machine-assisted paintings.
Across his signature square canvases, Groebel combines homemade photo emulsion techniques with gestural oil painting. With the proliferation of pocked-sized point-and-shoot cameras in the 1980s, Groebel began documenting his immanent surroundings, capturing the mundanity of an economically prosperous yet culturally repressed and divided nation, as well as its brewing subcultural undercurrents.
Groebels imagery, depicting urban landscapes, anonymous passers-by, a riled-up audience at a punk concert or intimate moments amongst friends, encapsulates the era’s postmodern ennui. Attuned to the rage and tenderness intertwined in ecstatic bodies, the works portray an understanding of alternative spaces as information systems that circumvent official institutions. These photographs, taken on the brink of the information age, reveal Groebel’s developing sensitivity to the collective psychology of an era, a theme that would later crystallise in his renowned TV paintings.
Groebel’s alchemical processes and DIY approach to media are evident in his use of homemade emulsion liquids, which transfer photographic documents onto canvas with a distinct, almost painterly, hue and grain. The photographic document is obscured or embellished by gestural brushstrokes, where thick layers of oil contrast against sepia tones, accentuating the spatial and auratic undertones of his compositions. These early works offer critical insight into Groebel’s evolving practice, tracing the conceptual and technical developments that have come to define his oeuvre.
at Schiefe Zähne, Berlin
until October 25, 2024