Gert & Uwe Tobias
10 May–23 August 2015
Museum Morsbroich
Gustav-Heinemann-Strasse 80
D-51377 Leverkusen
Germany
Gert and Uwe Tobias, who were born in 1973 in Brasov, Romania, and live and work in Cologne, have gained international attention at exhibitions at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, London’s Whitechapel Gallery, and other venues with their monumental color woodcuts. Their works present the viewer with a seemingly surreal and whimsical world. Their diverse figural repertoire combines high and low, finds from magazines, and details from books on the folk art of their native Transylvania with free borrowings from art history. This panopticon runs through the pair’s wide-ranging œuvre, through drawings, gouaches, and woodcuts, typewriter compositions, collages, and ceramic sculptures.
Constant exchange is the basis of the twins’ collaboration, the results of which present the two as a team, so that the “&” has become a kind of trademark. On the woodcut exhibition poster this ampersand leads a strange life of its own as a hybrid creature reaching for a flower. Inasmuch as the ideas of “Gert & Uwe Tobias” merge, the collage serves as their working mode in all mediums. The two combine the most varied pictorial elements from the realm of folklore or the archaic and put them through the filter of the modern avant-gardes so as to convert them into their own pictorial idiom.
For the major exhibition in the Museum Morsbroich, which with its mainly new pieces provides an overview of their recent work, Gert and Uwe Tobias have developed a special kind of presentation. Wall paintings link the works executed in different mediums into a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk. Similarities in subject matter and form run like a common thread through the exhibition: the brothers’ fascination with the grotesque and the ambivalent, with man-animal hybrids, with life and death, with content from both their original and current homelands, with seductively colorful surfaces and mysterious depths.
Catalogue
A catalogue of the exhibition, published by the Kettler Verlag, includes a foreword by Markus Heinzelmann and introductory essays by Fritz Emslander and Sarah Suzuki (MoMA, New York), as well as an illustrated section listing the artists’ previous exhibitions. (208 pages, roughly 160 color illustrations).
The curator of the exhibition is Fritz Emslander.
The exhibition opening will be on Sunday, 10 May at noon in the Spiegelsaal at Museum Morsbroich.
Graphics floor
Along with the Gert and Uwe Tobias exhibition the Museum Morsbroich is showing a selection of woodcuts from its own collection under the title Splinters of Light.
In the 1980s the woodcut experienced a genuine rebirth, a development the museum has noted in its collecting, having since acquired a large number of prints. The show presents some of the highlights from this collection.
With works by Cees Andriessen, Georg Baselitz, Martina Geist, Antonius Höckelmann, Per Kirkeby, Paco Knöller, Christoph M. Loos, Carsten Nicolai, Markus Oehlen, Heribert C. Ottersbach, Günther Uecker, and Bernd Zimmer
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