Gert und Uwe Tobias, Ohne Titel, 2010, Keramik, 2-teilig, 55,5 x 26 x 26 cm, Courtesy Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin.

Gert und Uwe Tobias, Ohne Titel, 2011, Collage, Mischtechnik auf Papier, 29,5 x 21 cm, Courtesy Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin.

Der Kunstverein
Klosterwall 23
+ 49 (0)40 32 21 59
Hamburg
Gert & Uwe Tobias
January 28-November 18, 2012

Where the wild things are? Surreal fantasies, dreams and fears are as old as humanity. Sometimes religiously motivated, sometimes childhood fantasies, sometimes popular tradition, and sometimes motivated by tourism considerations. As in the case of Dracula, who is reputed to haunt the native land of Gert & Uwe Tobias (born 1973 in Transylvania, Romania, live in Cologne) and who is no more than a projection and marketing tool for tourism. Before the tourists arrived to see Dracula, he was practically unknown in Transylvania. Nevertheless, the roots of the Dracula legend naturally go deep and he is far from being a contemporary invention. As a double figure — the noble count and the deathbringer — he feeds on his victims and abducts them to his true realm. An analogue of fantasy not kept in bounds by everyday life and reason.

Since completing their studies, Gert & Uwe Tobias have been collaborating in drawings, ceramics, and woodcuts, which they assemble into overall installations, often held together by coloured walls and spatial interventions. They are associated not only externally but also in motif. In each of their media they explore the creatures of surreal imagination and fantasy. Mostly they are figures that, although close to humankind, have distanced themselves from humanity. Sometimes these protagonists grow precariously upwards from vase or vessel-like components, some even need a stick to keep standing; sometimes collage elements from magazines are inserted in drawings that replace parts of the body. This produces a form of abstraction proper to fantasy, foreshortening at some points and extending immeasurably at others. See the heads sitting atop these constructions, which bear horns or have long, runny noses.

Folkloristic motifs are taken from collective societal structures, memories and traditions. Gert & Uwe Tobias can even be inspired by their mother's knitting patterns. Domesticated motifs, which the two transfer to their woodcuts and typewriter drawings. These are two laborious, indirect methods that work with overlap. Their woodcuts are produced as puzzle prints, a method in which the picture is produced from a block composed of separate elements. Only two prints are produced of each woodcut, flying in the face of mass production. Gert & Uwe Tobias set up a poster before each exhibition which the viewer encounters like a signpost. Like the cover of a book, it opens up the surreal space to the visitor in which the narration of the individual elements unfolds.

Other aspects in their exhibitions also have pragmatic points of departure: they present their small-scale ceramics largely on plinths that have a second one in the form of everyday objects. Some grow like bottle djinns out of vases, others stand on plates or butter dishes and coffee pots. The ceramics are not unrelated to household porcelain: there is a resemblance in their materiality and processing. Everyday life with its everyday objects as the basis of existence. What if everything around us were alive? Not only in childhood fantasy can teapots suddenly speak, become surreal projection surfaces.

The ceramics are thus given little form. From coat-like capes, headwear and hoods furrowed faces emerge, both alien and all too familiar, leaving abundant scope for personal associations.

The also small-scale drawings with their blurred contours have a dreamlike quality, as well. The sketches and drawings give the impression of being preparatory works for the woodcuts and stages on the road to attaining the greater abstraction needed to give motifs graphic form. It is not by chance that letters, too, repeatedly occur in their works as graphic abstractions par excellence. What is initially unformed and quiescent is more and more strongly conventionalised in pattern form. But also abstraction that gives a home to dreams.

For the Kunstverein Hamburg, Gert & Uwe Tobias are developing an installation that turns the entire premises of the Kunstverein into a fantastic headspace. From the foyer, up the stairs into the two exhibition halls, their works will be presented from January to March 2012 over a total area of 1,300 square metres. This exhibition is the biggest undertaking for the two artists and their largest exhibition to date. Part of their installation will then disappear to make room for presentations by other artists until, by the end of the year, only the foyer and staircase remain. What all these exhibitions (by Alexandra Bircken, Florian Baudrexel and Manuel Graf) will have in common is the shift between seemingly folkloristic and handicraft-oriented everyday practices and constructivist abstraction. They are in quest of the origins of human activity and being in collective and private realms, reflecting on an attentive form of subjectivity beyond expression focused on the individual.