Gloomy and empty landscapes open up in Philip Grözinger’s series ”Wasteland”. As a presentiment a dark and amorphous object in the centre of the painting calls upon our attention, an object that gives the impression of hiding a shocking event, or which in itself is an unpleasant truth. A subversive and disturbing darkness that can hide anything.  Where the strange and secret lurk behind a dark and dense surface. The large landscapes are accompanied by smaller canvasses with a judicious mixture of figures, where a mysterious man in white with his back turned against us is a returning element.

The paper-works of Sebastiaan Schlicher also only slowly opens up for the beholder. The works are a series of colourful worlds inhabited by trailer trash, aging rock stars and zombies on acid. All of them over-scribbled with a mixture of graffiti-like text pieces, consisting of quotations, jokes and lyrics from strangely different music genres as psychedelic rock, punk, glam, country and heavy metal. Whatever comes to the surface of the paper exists, layers upon layers upon layers of ideas and expressions.  The result is a blend of morbid exorcism and flower-power references in an over decorated, twisted, laterally reversed and perverted universe where the many  references, full of contradictions, and the overflow of paradoxical information sabotage the clarity of the narration.

Philip Groezinger is born in Braunschweig 1972, Sebastiaan Schlicher in Roermond, Holland 1975. Both artists live and work in Berlin.