HOLZ

El Bocho, M.Krammer, Ch.Baron, K.Kroiss, Eliot, Mari Kim Thomas Baumgärtel, Rainer Fetting, Thomas Schinderl, Martin Krammer, Christof Baron, Hubertus Giebe, Ewen Gur, Bill Hickey, Todd Kölmel, Astrid Köhler, Joao Noutel, Nina Maron, Giacomo Piussi, Raws, Skenar 73, Paul Souß ,Maximilian Welz, Phillip Wolf, Thitz, Dropix

this exhibition at the beginning of the year, deals with a material that has had a great place in painting for three millennia: wood. It is not suitable for large areas, so that since the Middle Ages people have switched to wooden panels and combined them with each other. There is also the attractive possibility of painting these wooden panels on both sides. For example, Luca Signorelli has created an altarpiece in the church in Cortona that can be rotated with a rolling device, depending on the date in the church calendar, one or the other side of the picture can be viewed by the faithful. Wood has different caracteristics than canvas. It offers resistance while the artist is painting, it acts, discards, becomes crooked, in the worst case it tears open. Artists of all generations know about it, as do curators in dealing with works of art. In the Berlin National Gallery, there is a Juan Gris painted on wood. It bends over on every journey and miraculously finds its way back to its old form as soon as it is back home.

An old part of a wooden bed serves the friends Peter Chevalier and Thomas Schindler as an opportunity to bring their much-discussed painterly ideas - each on one side - into an artistic dialogue. When Rainer Fettting begins painting on plywood in 1989, he is fascinated by the possibilities of applying highly diluted oil paint to a stable base, which challenges the imagination to add new forms to a wood pattern as the grown form. The large work shown here is formally captivating, the surface appears ephemeral when the paint is delicately applied, glowing mysteriously. Martin Krammer has been working in wood for decades and thus preserves an old Nordic tradition, the name sculptor applies to him in the truest sense of the word. Beams of Euro pallets form the basis of Christoff Baron's works. When he presents it for the first time in the gallery, he transports it to the gallery on his bike - again dismantled into individual parts. Giacomo Piussi, on the other hand, experiments on wood after a visit to the Bauhaus in Dessau and sketches his fascination with this now more than 100-year-old Bauhaus movement as a model in wood. Paul Sous builds bizarre apartments with wooden house models, which he imaginarily populates by monkeys and bats, only to turn around briefly and create oversized matchboxes. Mari Kim's little root children on tree slices enchant us just as much as Nina Maron's balloons, that evoke childhood dreams. El Bocho has always accompanied his street art stories with comics of wicked little Lucy, cut from plywood. Even cat lovers forgive Lucy's treatment of the animal. Astrid Köhler  Even cat lovers forgive Lucy's treatment of the animal. Astrid Köhler transports us to a faraway world where artists were tasked with creating exotic animals to the astonishment of the viewer—just think of the unicorn, which survived for centuries only as an artistic creation. Alongside Köhler's more delicate works is an awe-inspiring 8-meter-long crocodile by Philipp Wolf. And of course, a core theme of painting is not to be missed: landscapes. Skenar73 literally can't see the forest for the trees when creating his beautiful new forms on wood. RAWS then elevates this with a starry sky.

Wood, to cite Maximilian Welz, is an active image carrier that carries history, resistance and its own logic. Ursula Sax has worked a lot in wood, creating expansive structures as well as sculptures that can be actively integrated into life and used everyday, with a certain solemnity. There is a lot to see and learn, we are happy to start the New Year with an exhibition about an interesting carrier material and the resulting works of art and look forward to discussing much more with you on the opening evening and afterwards.