Christian Rothmaler at KIRCHGASSE

Artist: Christian Rothmaler

Exhibition title: Mountain View On Neom Om

Venue: KIRCHGASSE, Steckborn, Switzerland

Date: September 15 – November 17, 2018

Photography: images copyright and courtesy of the artist and KIRCHGASSE, Steckborn

With the title of his exhibition at Kirchgasse, Christian Rothmaler places his works in the con-text of a topology situated between West and East; present and future; technology and spirituality; Google’s headquarters in California and the planned city of Neom in the desert of Saudi Arabia. In this New Babylon, “the world’s most ambitious project, an entire new land, purpose-built for a new way of living” promises that human life, work, and bodies will become part of a project of endless optimization, never entirely in the present, always a bit in the future.

In an earlier, show, Being Time Squared (+ 0 -) presented in 2017 at the R. & R. Schlesinger Found – ation in Appenzellerland, Switzerland, Christian Rothmaler already exhibited a differentiated order of spatial and temporal references in his paintings. His new works explore this approach further.

Rothmaler presents his symbolically -charged motifs with a grid of yellow lines on a white back-ground. This lattice structure acts as a kind of “holodeck” before which the shapes, raw materiality and fluids of his paintings can continually undergo a transformation. The equally archaic and futuris-tic motifs always represent the medium and the materiality of the painting itself. They generate a virtual world in which the origins of history can be short-circuited, manipulated and realized with the dreams of a future.

As a central motif of the exhibition, the human hand repeatedly emerges as a symbol of the five sen-ses, the basis of communication and action. The hand in Rothmaler’s paintings however, has seven fingers. It can be understood as a relic of human creativity, a commentary on the growing superfluity of our physical potential, or as an image of future bodies that will once again create new images of their world, their history, and their selves.

Christian Rothmaler, Mountain View On Neom Om, 2018, exhibition view, KIRCHGASSE, Steckborn

Christian Rothmaler, Niemand freihändig, 2018, Ink, acrylic, oil on canvas, 130 x 115 cm

Christian Rothmaler, Nobody Outis, 2018, Ink, acrylic, oil on canvas, 190 x 145 cm

Christian Rothmaler, Mountain View On Neom Om, 2018, exhibition view, KIRCHGASSE, Steckborn

Christian Rothmaler, Meisterhand in Sonnenschein, 2016, Ink, oil on canvas, 40×40 cm

Christian Rothmaler, Die Verfasserin sortiert, 2018, Ink, acrylic, oil on canvas,18 x 13 cm

Christian Rothmaler, Tomasso heilt die Kranken, 2018, Ink, acrylic, oil on canvas, 210 x 180 cm

Christian Rothmaler, Mountain View On Neom Om, 2018, exhibition view, KIRCHGASSE, Steckborn

Christian Rothmaler, Zyklops Reste, 2018, Ink, acrylic, oil on canvas, 105 x 155 cm

Christian Rothmaler, Get cream in Neom, 2018, Ink, acrylic, oil on canvas, 105 x 90 cm

Christian Rothmaler, Go Gobang Green (Effizienztasche), 2018, Bag and plant

Christian Rothmaler, Tulpes Hand wird Ali, 2017, Oil, ink on canvas, 40×40 cm

Christian Rothmaler, Mountain View On Neom Om, 2018, exhibition view, KIRCHGASSE, Steckborn

Christian Rothmaler, Tomasso heilt die Kranken, 2018, Ink, acrylic, oil on canvas, 210 x 180 cm

Christian Rothmaler, Jack und die Tulpe vergessen zu essen, 2018, Ink, acrylic, raddle on canvas, 250 x 45 cm

Christian Rothmaler, Seemantics Tower, 2018, Ink, acrylic, oil on canvas, 250 x 45 cm

Christian Rothmaler, Mountain View On Neom Om, 2018, exhibition view, KIRCHGASSE, Steckborn

Christian Rothmaler, 1000 und 1 New Waver in Erkrath, 2018, Ink, acrylic, oil on canvas, 20 x 20 cm

Christian Rothmaler, Verwirrter Zyklop, 2018, Ink, acrylic, oil on canvas, 20 x 20 cm

Christian Rothmaler, Mountain View On Neom Om, 2018, exhibition view, KIRCHGASSE, Steckborn

Christian Rothmaler, Trabant mit Baum, 2017, Ink, acrylic, oil on mineral paper on glass, 22,9×30,5 cm

Christian Rothmaler, Park Grant, Plaster, Wood, acrylic, 40×40 cm, 2018, with Sick Sehmantik Instrument, Plaster, gouache, acrylic, 23 x 21 x 0,3 cm, 2016, and Food Dmanissi, Plaster, terracotta, gouache, acrylic, 2016-2017