Telling Stories, Tracing Fragments

The exhibition „Telling Stories, Tracing Fragments" presents figurative works by three artists who approach, utilize, and expand the theme of figuration in different ways through the media of print, drawing, and painting. The visual fragments of the resulting works can be interpreted as open, ambiguous narratives. The exhibiting artists stand at different stages of their careers - ranging from students to, with Nazim Ünal Yilmaz, an artist with two completed academy diplomas and an impressive exhibition history.

Christian Rothwangl creates virtuoso portraits in varying degrees of abstraction, while generally maintaining a certain proximity to still lifes, free-associative gestures, or painterly surfaces that process the image in different ways. This gives the works a dreamlike-real diary character, one that perhaps can only emerge outside of the textual. The works balance the openness of the gestural and seem, similar to the work of a classical sculptor, to concretize figuration or the image from within.

Felix Theile works in drawing and printmaking, using monochromatic surfaces among other techniques to create different situational configurations of people and places. He offers narratives that, through their visual openness, become at times dreamlike projection surfaces while retaining references to everyday realities; one could understand him as a graphically thinking storyteller.

Nazim Ünal Yilmaz processes socio-political themes, combining and overlaying canonized art-historical motifs with a personal symbolism developed over the years; depictions of stairs or clocks may stand for progress or development, blonde hair or make-up for transvestism, etc. The resulting highly charged works are characterized by striking coloration, and continuously shift their subjects while maintaining the evolving symbolism.