At the end of the year we are pleased to present a group exhibition with Katia Bourdarel, Com & Com, Bodo Korsig, Reto Leibundgut, Radenko Milak, Dominik Stauch and Otto Tschumi. invites you to linger and ponder. Let yourself be surprised what stories arise.

Katia Bourdarel was born in 1970 in Marseille, she lives and works in Paris. Her seemingly mystical multimedia works transport one into a fictional world of fairy tales. They are skilfully drawn and painted imaginary worlds whose subtly arranged motifs suggest “prettiness”; but in fact the spectators are spirited away into a world where good and evil rub shoulders—a world believed to be long lost but actually very present. Her pictures tell a mysterious story, of loveliness and fear, affection and abandonment, where one constantly oscillates between the apparent poles of good and evil so that everything remains unresolved. Katia Bourdarel is extremely good at interweaving strands of narrative that offer us no closure but several possibilities for further imaginative investigations. Her watercolours invite the spectators to delve into a new dimension. They are picture stories—fairy tales without beginning or end.

Com&Com The artist duo was founded in 1997 by Marcus Gossolt and Johannes M. Hedinger. They live and work mainly in Zurich and St.Gallen. The works in the exposition are from the forth painting cycle by Com&Com. Tough they have already provoked traditional painting with brush and color in their earlier work, new they expand their color- and material-research to the painting substrate. The early series of color gradient were realized by airbrush, the BLENDING series is entirely without any additive color application. The color will affect directly to the painting substrate, as the canvas will be weaving in with thousand colored threads. Through specific color change within the horizontal and vertical threads the artists developed a new form of color mixture that enable a painting entirely without conventional manual color application or print. The color mixture develops directly in the eye of the beholder.

Bodo Korsig was born in 1962 in Zwickau, Germany. He lives and works in Trier and New York. He studied sculpture and stone restoration in Berlin. Working within a broad range of artistic techniques and materials, including wood cut, drawing, painting, sculptural reliefs as well as photography and film. Many years ago Korsig turned to neurosciences and behavioural research, driven by the question of what structures underlie human behaviour and perception. He creates poetic, provocative, mysterious and pictogrammatic images about existential subjects of humanity. The round, soft forms, seductive at a first glance, turn into strange plants that radiate an unpredictable and uncontrollable energy on closer examination.

Reto Leibundgut was born 1966 in Büren zum Hof, Bern. He lives and works in Basel and Thun. From the very beginning of Reto Leibundgut’s artistic activity he has exclusively concentrated on using secondhand and old material. He is a veritable addict of materials such as discarded wood, chipboards, veneer, leather, plastics, fabrics and carpets and everything is carefully collected and reutilized. The essence of his work is formed by the large collection and accumulation of material. The different materials are elaborately manufactured and placed into a new context. Cheap wood is ennobled and the vulgar becomes art. He not only recycles materials for his content but he uses images as well. He often uses old tapestries and stills from porn movies or photographs as models. By means of traditional, allegedly dusty techniques, such as intarsia or embroidery, he transfers content into a new dimension and questions familiar perceptions.

Radenko Milak was born in 1980 in former Yugoslavia and currently lives and works in Bosnia and Herzegovina. His works focus on questions of freezing or storing visual data in one’s own individual memory or by means of film and photography. In his watercolours he uses film footage, news reports and press photographs to transform them into small and intimate visual scenarios that can trigger the facts and stories behind these images while turning them into autonomous visual narratives if the political and historical facts are unknown. The contrast between light and dark is at the centre of his works. He uses black water colour which he applies by means of a special flow technique and his very own particular handling of the brush. The large-scale water colours in this exhibition, which thematically refer to the world of film and cinema, have been created especially for this occasion. At this year’s Venice Biennale, he was invited by Bosnia-Herzegovina to exhibit in their pavilion.

Dominik Stauch was born 1962 in London. Most of the time of his childhood he spent in London, Cleveland Ohio/USA and Kairo. Today he lives and works in Thun. Dominik Stauch works constantly at an „expansion“ of painting as he combines different materials (painting in oil, digital prints, computer animation, sculptures and installations) but at the same time he remains faithful to the color theory and also he remains an artist. His goal is the consistent interaction of colors and forms. The reduction of basic geometric forms let him enough flexibility, to harmonize his conceptually attempt with the newest technique. Art history, music theory of the 20th Century and the Beat-literature give him the necessary foundation to create his work with the familiar depth.

Otto Tschumi (1904–1985) was born in Bern. His works surprise us by their unusual combination of different artistic features. Austere geometrical lines sit comfortably next to amorphous forms, and Tschumi’s virtuoso handling of a reduced formal language is as impressive as his meticulous depiction of detail. What his works all have in common is both a tendency towards defamiliarization and a playful lightness of expression. As a young artist Tschumi, modelling himself on Paul Klee and Pablo Picasso, developed a cubistic formal language, with the human body – deformed beyond recognition in his drawings and lithographs – being the central theme of these works The Paris Surrealists inspired Tschumi’s penchant for the fantastic, and his artistic autonomy greatly benefitted from the notion of spiritual independence postulated in the Surrealist manifesto.