31.8.-6.10.07

In the actual exhibition Kotscha Reist and Dominik Stauch show new works. The title “Perfect Day” follows to a song of the cult band velvet underground, operating in the social environment of Andy Warhol’s Factory – and gives ample scope for the interpretation of the different series of works. The bandleader, Lou Reed, described in the song his perfect day –the presented scale of art allows to deduced multi-layered associations.

With “Remember” Kotscha Reist brings a plastic work to the gallery for the first time. As if accidentally fragile branches cast in plastic lean on the wall; but on closer inspection the “scout quotation” is decoded as a three-dimensional drawing. The branches, partly fitted with sausages, remind of campfire romanticism, old carefree times – and ironically show in a subtle and witty way the dream of an ideal world. The two large-format oil paintings “Evergreen between Autumn and Spring I&II” bear witness to Reists necromantic tenor. Gloriously poetic the painter created two versions from the same camera-ready art and hereby lets the spectators participate in the artistic process of creation. The painting “Maison de Général” documents impressionably the artists constant “Burrowing” in the fund of world history and his own history. The centre stage of the new works is the paperwork “Heroes and Colleagues” consisting of 73 parts, a magnificent tribute to 20th century painting. Reist painted many subjects; portraits of paragons, friends in the art world, and his artistic companions – all in different techniques.

With “Undercover” Dominik Stauch exhibits a wallpaper installation for the first time. This wallpaper, created in lithography, and imprinted with silver, covers the entire wall. The work reflects the aesthetics from the 70s and yet manages to the step far into and embraces the 21st century. The large-sized verre églomisé, „Studies for a Naked City”, virtually enlarges the room. He manages the difficult balancing act between painting in an abstract colour field and the realistic, legible, individual way of painting. The series “Pops”, extravagantly produced inkjet works, celebrates once more Stauchs intention to present mathematic-geometrical compositions in a relaxed lightness. Born are positive, pretended accidental structures, which capture the spectators eye. The sculptural installation “Three Tables for the middle east” consists of three tables playing with the words Love, Faith, and Hope. In Christian-orthodox tradition those words are the personified daughters of Wisdom/Sophia. Stauch has carved in the words in “Post-Pop-Style” by use of point writing into the tabletop. In such a way the everyday object “Table” may be increased to be “pseudo-sacral”, the sculpture mutates to an icon, whereby the advertising aesthetic of the font draws a bow to our idols of our world, inundated by stimulus.

Bernhard Bischoff, August 2007