Andreas Golder, Gekackt non est Pictum, 2006.

Andreas Golder, Die Macht der Malerei, 2005.

Andreas Golder, Schlimmer Wird Nicht Mehr, 2006.

ARKEN
Skovvej 100
Ishøj
+45 43 54 02 22
Andreas Golder –
It Has My Name On It
January 26-
May 18, 2008

The young painter Andreas Golder is one of the brand new talents on the international art scene. The exhibition Andreas Golder – It Has My Name On It is his first solo show in a museum. It may very well become his international breakthrough.

A lone figure explodes in a fit of rage so devastating that his face dissolves as thick, grey smoke. An unfortunate person receives a blow to the head, making blood squirt and his eye pop out. Andreas Golder’s (b. 1979) paintings explode in colours and subjects, interpreting life and time in a humorous and intelligent manner. The subjects are drawn from the humdrum of the everyday, from art history and the dramatic imagery of pop culture.

Golder has attained success at a very young age. He is already a fixture in Berlin’s vibrant and creative artist milieu. The exhibition at Arken is his first solo show in a museum, presenting 31 works including a number of brand new paintings that Golder has painted specially for Arken’s exhibition.

The ideal does not interest Andreas Golder. In his paintings we encounter the antiheroes of the everyday and the grotesque sides to human existence. The seemingly banal and humorous subjects hold existential questions about the identity of the individual and about the culture in which we live. One example is the painting Gekackt non est pictum (2006) in which a lonely person is slowly dissolving while struggling onward against a strong wind: Here the experience of the headwind soon turns into a more general image of life’s absurdity. The remarkable title “shitting is not painting” mixes lavatory German and Latin, underlining Golder’s self-irony and his humorous distance to being an artist today.

“I get my titles from people around me. I hear them in conversations or steal them from magazines like Der Spiegel. I also have a pile of postcards with various titles that a girl sent me every day for a year. I still use those if they fit the painting, says Golder.

Golder’s painting is characterized by great technical scope. Figurative and abstract elements intertwine in dynamic compositions. His pictures are brimming with references to everything from art historical masterpieces by Francis Bacon, Philip Guston and Per Kirkeby to comics, snapshots and hackneyed kitsch. As with the often bizarre titles, the artist picks up these images where he finds and is fascinated by them. In the paintings the more or less anonymous images are soaked up and recreated into new and personal expressions.

Andreas Golder was born in 1979 in Ekaterinenburg in the former Soviet Union. As a child he was tutored in the thorough and precise, realistic style of painting and drawing championed by the Communist regime.

When the Wall came down he and his family fled to Germany where he encountered abstract art for the first time. The duality between realistic and abstract Elements is a recurring trait in his painting – along with a number of references to art history and popular culture. Andreas Golder lives and works in Berlin. He is associated with the Berlin based Klara Wallner Galerie.

Andreas Golder, Spassbremse, 2006.