Ferdinand Dölberg & Georg Vierbuchen at Galerie Anton Janizewski

Artists: Ferdinand Dölberg & Georg Vierbuchen

Exhibition title: Raum im Raum

Venue: Galerie Anton Janizewski, Berlin, Germany

Date: June 13 – July 31, 2020

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Galerie Anton Janizewski, Berlin

The gallery Anton Janizewski presents the work of two very different young artists in the exhibition „Raum im Raum“. Ferdinand Dölberg focusses on painting, Georg Vierbuchen on objects. As different as their media may be, both react to the present in very sensitive ways.

From June 13 through July 31, the exhibition „Raum im Raum“ presents work by the artists Ferdinand Döl-berg and Georg Vierbuchen. Both deal with space, in their practice and around their works, each in a unique way.

Ferdinand Dölberg, born in 1998, primarily works as a painter. Looking at his paintings from the past two ye-ars, an astonishing development is evident in the work of the young artist. Starting from the soft, gentle, and painterly figurative paintings, his pictures develop a harder, linear style. Dölberg’s pictures, in which he not only uses oil paint, but also chalk, epoxy raisin, and monotypes, are too detailed to be adequately represen-ted in the digital realm. And yet, his painting sits very well in our present moment.

Dölberg deals with the topic of individuality. Although that has been a problem in painting for centuries, he treats it in an appropriate way for our digitised present. The uniqueness of his figures is paradoxically found in the emptiness of their faces. They allow any viewer to empathise. Eventually, lines and grids make an appearance in his images, as signifiers of a system: repetition in a grid, modernity’s nightmare. This points to repetition as artistic principle, but also to the precarious state of individuality in a mass society.

Since 2017, Dölberg studies at the Universität der Künste in Berlin in the class of Thomas Zipp. In 2018, he was artist in residence at the Operndorf Afrika in Burkina Faso, 2019 he received a grant from the Studien-stiftung des deutschen Volkes. In the same year, he was awarded with the prize for painting by the Ulrich und Burga Knispel-Stiftung.

If Dölberg places the subject in the empty middle of his painting practice and develops his topics from the-re, the second artist of the show, Georg Vierbuchen, born in 1992, since 2017 a student at Universität der Künste with Christine Streuli, proceeds in the opposite direction. Vierbuchen makes objects, many of them in ceramics. He does not censor the impressions he gets from his environment. This is the main inspiration for his work, says the artist.

Vierbuchen creates moulds from everyday objects. He keeps coming back to things that suggest security in our daily life: poles that separate the sidewalk from the road, the wheels of rental bikes that promise to take us safely from one place to another, swimming aids for children. His recent objects are composite sculptures. Threaded pipes, joints, and valves, actually engineered to withstand high pressure, are reproduced in cera-mics, a tender and fragile material.

Although a lot of the objects display utilitarian strictness, it is not clear which purpose they serve. Vierbu-chen’s work plays with kitsch and nostalgia, with the principles of mass production and unique objects, and they deal with the over-production of commodities. The banal objects are reproduced with an ironic twist, and infused with the potential for future nostalgia.