The Berlin-based artist Fritz Bornstück (b. 1982) finds his motifs right in front of his door. He paints psychedelic nightscapes in oil: a comic strip where mountains of garbage pile high and duck-like figures watch the scene. For his exhibition But it Felt Like a Kiss, Fritz Bornstück has created paintings that cannot escape their own circularity. As an organising principle, recycling connects the beginning with the end: it contains everything and yet anything can be made out of it. It is composting made into picture form, caught in a perpetual state of change. Fritz Bornstück paints against time, he lets his ideas ferment on canvas as long as they are still malleable: paintings as a collision course full of colour and black humour. In Bornstück’s Disney Wasteland, the on-lookers have dressed up in duck costumes. A figure, who at first glance seems shy and completely harmless, ubiquitously observes the viewer. The large, innocent duck eyes become mirrors – an animal as an emblem for generation that has grown up with Donald Duck and Heavy Metal.

Fritz Bornstück graduates as Meisterschüler from Thomas Zipp’s class at Universität der Künste (UdK) in Berlin this summer.

The idea to create a new, natural space through paintings can also be found in the exhibition Wood Nation by Leonard Forslund (b. Sweden 1959). Here the artist builds a country, a kind of settlement made of river landscapes and forests. Forslund’s landscapes are sober and strictly formally composed. Technically they bring to mind the accurate work of a carpenter. He wants to create a “nation” of paintings that is entirely independent of technology. Isolation, boundaries and the tranquillity of Sweden are thematically addressed. The idea for the exhibition originates from the reading and illustration work for the American poets Edgar Lee Masters’ anthology-like collection of poems SPOONRIVER from 1915-16. The poems in this book are almost a collection of epitaphs. Short reports of a deceased population, their fates or the qualms of conscience they have over the lots of others. The graves lie at The Hill, the cemetery on the hill outside the fictitious town Spoon River somewhere in USA.

Leonard Forslund studied at the Royal Academy in Copenhagen. He lives and works in the Danish capital.