Ruhmkugeln

The HOLLEREI invites to the first solo presentation of Arnold Berger, taking place in the salon of the gallery.

Berger's paintings are the results of an artistic practice that condenses the perhaps endless complexities of situations, objects and structures into pictorial compositions – whereby Berger does not strive for resemblance to what is supposedly depicted: his paintings are visually static manifestations of dynamic, non-concludable semantics.

In his working process, Berger focuses less on aesthetics than on an emotional understanding of the themes he processes. Consequently, visual references to these original themes rarely emerge. The accumulation of certain forms used is not a contradiction for Berger: the circle, for instance, is used as a carrier of meaning whose concrete nature seems to have no relevance – except that Berger appears to have found trust in it: he trusts certain forms to withstand readings that were not intended by him.

At the same time, the works also represent an attempt to process focused themes in a non-symbolic, non-expressive manner – despite the occasional use of visual codes with high symbolic content. Thus Berger also flirts with the potential for misunderstanding: he uses symbols not for their semantics, but to address the separation of their visuality and semantics. They document a form of expression beyond verbality. To approach this "post-symbolic visual world of symbols," it may be helpful to think of painting not as a visually permanent, but above all a semantically open medium – what is ultimately most thematised is the impossibility of concluding interpretive processes.