Galerie Mikael Andersen is pleased to present the solo show Endless Nameless by German artist Fritz Bornstück. The opening is Thursday 3rd October 2013 from 5-7pm.

The exhibition…

“… does not run a straight course from beginning to end. It hunts; and in the hunting, it sometimes worries the same raccoon in different trees, or different raccoons in the same tree, or even what turns out to be no raccoon in any tree. It finds itself balking more than once at the same barrier and taking off on other trails. It drinks often from the same streams, and stumbles over some cruel country. And it counts not the kill but what is learned of the territory explored.”

                                                                                      Nelson Goodman

Fritz Bornstück would like to introduce his current solo show with this quote from the American philosopher, [Ways of Worldmaking, Hackett, 1978].

The exhibition presents new works by the artist in a range of different media. In his new works Bornstück takes what he calls ‘cultural leftovers’ such as fragments of images or other seemingly worthless scraps and rubbish that have a significant value for the artist. He then appropriates, translates and passes the works on for reinterpretation. For example, the artist took a video at Tempelhof airport of people watching the sunset. The file was damaged while being imported to the computer, which impacted almost the entire film. The pattern-like imagery created by this import-error became the source material for a video which reinterprets Kurt Cobain’s version of the Terrie Jacks song Seasons in the Sun, then remixed by DJ Hobby (the DJ name of Fritz Bornstück). The pixels of this video then became the source material for some of the oil paintings in the show. These paintings were in turn scanned and given to Raphael Hauber who reinterpreted them as textile patterns for bespoke furniture. The furniture is equipped with speakers from the inside, playing a soundtrack composed by Ernst Markus which was made in response to the works in the show.

This process of creating and reinterpreting was opened up in order to encourage collaboration and participation; it is a layered accumulation of paintings, objects and sounds that create an associative space for the viewer. The viewer is then invited to extend those thoughts and feelings evoked by the patterns and tender, melancholic colour palette.

“The minute something enters the world, it starts to wander. Fritz Bornstück addresses this in his work in many different ways. We see it in the way things get “stuck” to his paintings like flies to flypaper, because they were simply “there” close to the canvas – a kind of residue of the process or simply lived experience. We see it in the way principles of digital imagery, such as pixels, find their way into  an oil painting, emphasizing the inescapable rubbing-off of the “copy” on to the “original.” Things and people constantly interfere with Bornstück’s work, so they are never what they were supposed to be, which is of course already an impossibility from the outset, and perhaps not very interesting anyway – conversation is key.”

                                                                        Matthias Ussing Seeberg

Photo credits: Jan Søndergaard