29 Mar 2010

Jorg Lohse: 'Voodoo Problems' at Berlin Art Projects

Jörg Lohse: 'Voodoo Problems' at Berlin Art Projects

Opening: Wednesday, 31 March 2010, 7 – 9 pm
Berlin Art Projects I Showroom, Unter den Linden 40, 10117 Berlin-Mitte

Berlin Art Projects proudly presents 'Voodoo Problems,' a first solo exhibition with new canvases and watercolors by Leipzig painter Jörg Lohse. Please join us for the opening on Wednesday, 31 March from 7 – 9 pm!

With its explosive picture-worlds melding oversized supermodels, fragments of text and name brand fashion logos in a fantastic collage, Jörg Lohse's work is often reminiscent of pop art. And yet it is not. Lohse's paintings are a clash of 21st century consumer icons in all their many facets – appropriated, smashed apart and fused together in no less fascinating canvases. No wonder Lohse, who studied at the internationally-renowned Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig, counts among the younger generation's most successful painters.

The artist himself stresses the importance of chance in the composition of his paintings, which are usually sectioned into two or three parts. Here we see him combining motifs and familiar images from our ever-present glossy magazines and advertisements in a dizzyingly associative world, only to pull them apart again on canvas. Unsurprisingly they are always dead on, striking their target with tremendous impact and momentum: both a compact fantasy similar to our every day world while opening new, fascinating dimensions at the same time. Does this mish-mash of contemporary fragments reflect reality or illusion? Figuration or abstraction?

Delicate in his watercolors – a stunning blend of landscape and comic book elements – and hard in his enormous works on canvas, Lohse far-flung images fuse together in a complete whole. The result: highly impressive pictures that pin the viewer down, make their insides dance – which as we all know is precisely what good art should do.

Jörg Lohse (*1967 in Leipzig) 1992-1997 Studied painting at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig, where he completed his Master's with Ulrich Hachulla in 1999. Lohse lives and works in Leipzig and Bozen.