Florian Baudrexel, Tobias Hantmann

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Press Release

“Florian Baudrexel’s room installations, sculptures, reliefs and collages are reminiscent of those by modern artists such as Schwitters, Balla or Rudolf Belling. As absolute as the formal aspiration also appears, the abstract volumes and rhythms of his compositions are more expressive of architecture than an autonomous purism of form. The forceful gesture of his spatially penetrating constructions is expressed in a complex, highly visible contemporary multi-materialism of cardboard and Styrofoam waste, foils, double glazing and advertising leaflets which, due to an affirmative artistic approach, experience a revaluation and an occasional reversal or their worthlessness.” (Katharina Koppenwallner).

In the exhibition at the Bernd Kugler Gallery, Florian Baudrexel combines one of his striking and forceful expressionist reliefs with a series of new collages that are arranged to form a wall. With their complex spatiality, the small format works from cheap advertising brochures which are presented in self-built frames are reminiscent of a cubist formal vocabulary.

Tobias Hantmann has been working with the kind of velour carpets available in the high street of differing format for some years, on which he embosses structures with the most simple of tools. In his latest work, we see ourselves confronted by ephemeral pictures which, in terms of their form, connect with cubism or classic still life painting. Due to their indexical character, the arrangements by Hantmann clearly follow the trail of something we’ve seen before – namely the trailblazing activity of the artist – and yet at the same time alternate between artistic gesture and photographic presentation. This is because they refer to the trail of an activity which is immediately stamped by its appearance, only, however to be able to subjectively present us with the worlds of images composed using this indexical trail.

A group of three dimensional works proves to have just as much a double meaning as the carpets. Here, in a trompe-l’oeil procedure, we see Hantmann exactly emulating the reflective and shiny bases of a set of cooking pots. The pots captured in this way are then mounted at ground level so that they almost look like they are floating. Initially arranged in groups, Hantmann moves his ‘sculptures’ across into a visual paradigm, however, by photographing them from a raised visual platform. These exposures, which are to a greater or lesser degree spatially reduced, either complement or counteract the existence of the actual objects in the exhibition room.