↳ Exhibitions

Tobias Spichtig at Deborah Schamoni

April 15, 2019

Artist: Tobias Spichtig

Exhibition title: SPRING 2019

Venue: Deborah Schamoni, Munich, Germany

Date: March 23 – May 18, 2019

Photography: Ulrich Gebert, all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Deborah Schamoni, Munich

In SPRING 2019, the overall form of the show boils down to an ever-narrowing gulf separating painting and sculpture. Filigrees that composed sculptures last year find themselves on a canvas this year, while the metallic flower sculptures become physical logos of last years paintings. But there’s something more pensive about this collection than others. It’s as if the works are busy thinking about themselves as esoteric objects filling a room in the middle of a city.

The show is focused around a series of paintings that depict various personal objects on distinct colored canvases. High-heeled boots, sunglasses and flowers: inanimate objects that read like portraits for an age where the ingestion of mediated objects has become our primary function. In the anthropocene, a series of paintings is a play on the idea that production is ephemeral and uses a constant idea of style to sustain itself.

In previous installations by Spichtig, human shaped figures made of used clothing donated from friends were drenched in resin and posed in different ways throughout a gallery. Those sculptures became stand-ins for us, hanging out in a gallery space and wearing all the symbols of a newfound leisure economy.

As it is with the majority his work, you’ll find yourself within one of two rhythms. The space will either be filled with everyday objects like desks, fridges, and mattresses, or the space will be sparsely populated with paintings and sculptures posing like in a photoshoot.

It’s as if he’s using the concept of material the same way comedians refer to their jokes as material. A series of paintings becomes a row of one-liners, albeit one-liners that diverge into abstraction and complexity. Of course a painting is still a painting, but in this context they are able to play with the meaninglessness, loss, humor, and the redefinition of space which are all side effects of a late capitalist reality.

Taken together these shows have created a small cast of characters that use this disassociation as their lodestar. They’ve adopted whatever anxiety Spichtig himself has about the world and where his work fits into it. And ultimately they compose a body of work that

exhibits how production begins and ends as a comment on the cultural miasma that we all experience.

Text by Patrick McGraw