On the wrong track

Under the title "On the wooden path", we are showing three artistic personalities who could not be more different in their working methods, their thinking and feeling, their handling of the material wood, which as the basic material of their art is the lowest common denominator, at least at first glance.

Let's take a look around together:

Maike Gräf presents us with a selection of dewy-eyed works. Anyone who still has the works from her last solo exhibition two years ago in mind or is looking at them in the room next door, enamoured and woody, will be able to gauge the difference: The colouring has become softer, the contours are less sharply emphasised, the wood is allowed to show its soft hue more. The sculptures appear more poetic, more delicate. Less contrast gives the colours more space, emphasising the materiality and the rising form of the figures.

As always, Maike Gräf takes a classic sculptural approach and cuts her figures out of the block of wood. The themes of her art are also classical: love, life and death. The way the artist deals with all this classicism is striking:

She confidently and almost incidentally deals with the legacy of modernism - the prismatically cut, perspective-nested volumes refer to the cubism of the 1910/20s, the exaggerated expression of the figures to expressionism, and the combination of rudeness and delicacy that her works radiate is inconceivable without the tradition of art brut of the 1950/60s.

And isn't it exciting to see how Maike Gräf transfers this tradition, one could even say this ballast, into the here and now?

The clear colour scheme, the emphasis on contours, the reduction and alienation of colours and the exaggerated body language come straight from the street. And from the newspaper kiosk. For digital natives: from the net. Maike Gräf mixes graffiti and comic strips, street art and manga, epic drama and trashy terseness with all the classics and invents something new.

And she also tells stories: Who is hugging each other in an intimate kiss? Who is the little sun worshipper who turns so hopefully towards the Alster, finds nothing today and then has to shine himself? And the tree of knowledge, which grows eyes as fruit, which look out in different directions, which fall to the ground and hopefully allow new trees to grow? And who is the little golem who playfully builds his world, so full of optimism and innocence, so chaotic and destructive?

Like Maike Gräf, Thomas Putze is also an uninhibited multiplier. He combines found, discarded, sorted or otherwise disposed of wood and metal. He combines found forms with his own forms, he cuts, carves, bends, paints, wraps, screws, glues and plugs.

Thomas Putze tells stories with his choice of materials alone. The story, for example, of the removed wooden window frames, which were solid and durable, which were repainted again and again over the years, which could be repaired and which were then removed and thrown away. Thomas Putze's approach of using objects far removed from their original function sharpens our gaze. Our view of the world of things with which we surround ourselves. When do we ever think about the cycle of things, of goods, about their nature, about the value of a piece of wood, about the labour required to build a window frame?

All of the artist's stories are about us humans as social beings. In the series of works exhibited today, it is above all our characteristic as herd animals that he analyses in more detail. Is it easier to have fun and shed our inhibitions in the protection of a group? The almost naked women in girls, girls, girls certainly feel extremely good, they are self-confident, they entice and yet do not offer themselves. Or the demonstrators, what are they demonstrating, what are they all showing? Are they showing their masculinity? Standing together so intimately, so relaxed and at ease with themselves during an intimate activity. They seem to trust each other, are at ease in the company of the man next to them. A woman in between? Unthinkable!

The group always has the theme of sequencing. One, and one, and another, and so on. So there is also a rhythm, a beat in the group. In his works, Thomas Putze explores which song is being played in the group. The small white work die meisten irren shows in extreme reduction, almost abstractly, how a chimerical group emerges from the fog with just a few cuts from the rhythm of the lines. In the large appeal no. 2, the individuality of the people who have lined up forms a wave and, when they are outnumbered, the individual dissolves into the sound of the mass. I'm sure you won't be surprised, ladies and gentlemen, when I tell you that Thomas Putze makes music and performance art as well as visual art...! You will have noticed that his performance "Auf dem Holzweg" is already underway. You can look forward to the final chord after the end of the speech.

And what path does the third artist in our exhibition, Yves Rasch, take? He always cuts his complex organic forms from a block, whose breakthroughs, overlaps and perfection initially astonish us as viewers.

Our rationality is suspended for a moment, we just want to know what the form looks like, want to walk around it and, at a favourable moment, feel what it is with our hands. As if in an experiment, Yves Rasch seems to demonstrate to us how strong our senses are and how absolutely they make our experience of the world possible in the first place. In front of Yves Rasch's sculptures, we are close to our sensations, to things that we did not even know and yet immediately recognise.

Yves Rasch's sculptures are condensed movements, movement that has become form. They do not depict things, but visualise fundamental principles of life such as movement, growth, rest and balance.

In the exhibition, we are showing a series of works on the theme of breathing. Breathing, this uninterrupted, usually not consciously perceived movement, sometimes regular, sometimes not, sometimes fast, sometimes slow, which is a basic function of living beings. Klangkörper rot from 2012 forms the starting point for this theme. The circular form, the starting point in many of Yves Rasch's works, is pulled apart and then seemingly pulled back together again; moving strands of fibre hold the whole, providing stability and flexibility. In the current works, which form a group under the title Breathing, this principle is taken further. The forms seem to free themselves from the circular template, they become amorphous and irregular and yet always contain the circle as a basic form and as a metaphor for the perpetual sequence of becoming and passing away.

Yves Rasch's objects awaken in us a need for closeness, for touch. We are directly addressed on an emotional level.

With this attitude, Yves Rasch consciously and self-confidently adopts a very unique position in contemporary art. He relies entirely on the power of form and the possibilities of wood as a material and urges us to focus on our innate sensuality. As a third way of walking the wooden path, Yves Rasch refers us to the basis of all experience and lays the foundation, so to speak, for our approach to the world and to art anyway.

I cordially invite you to visit us from time to time. We regularly exchange sold exhibits and thus always offer new insights.

With this in mind, I wish you a stimulating tour!