Arnd Kaestner | relocated #2
November 25, 2006 - January 17, 2007
Opening: Saturday, November 25 at 7 a.m.

`We don't need things we love things`

We are pleased to announce the second exhibition at Filipp Rosbach with Arnd Kaestner's participation, »we don't need things we love things«. We cordially invite you and your friends to the vernissage at 7 p.m. on Saturday, November 25.

The artist, a native of Hamburg, has become known in past years primarily for his paintings of extremely everyday things. This exhibition shows for the first time an extensive range of his current work series. As the title already suggests, the focus here is on the mere use of detached moments of admiration. Initially depicting garage doors, corrugated metal, or simple shelves, Kaestner later analyzed the visual and factual aesthetics of diverse barrier tapes in the series »Tapes«. Up to now, his gaze has surveyed simple objects, which he then depicted. Meanwhile he is working in chocolate. In this case, not in the truest sense of the term, but rather in painting, as ever. His chocolates are mid-sized to large-format tableaus, in which Arnd Kaestner pays homage to his old and new masters. Madonna, Bridget Riley, Bob Dylan, and Samuel Beckett - common to all of them is their great achievement and that Arnd Kaestner has devoted one of his chocolates to each of them.

Along with these, others of his and also our heroes will be presented in the exhibition. Viewed mathematically, the new work »Bach« provides the center of the exhibition. With the dimensions of 540 x 300 centimeters, it is hardly dainty, but it sacrifices none of the filigree quality of its smaller sisters. Even if Kaestner's works are paintings and also [can] have a conceptual approach, his aim appears much broader. Set in relation to his earlier works, which on the one hand attribute aesthetic importance to the objects we deal with every day and on the same lines reveal the formal relationship humans maintain with their surroundings, he now expands this view into a social dimension. By presenting his relationship to artists in various media, he shows whom he admires and what pleases him. He places both himself and his own work in relation, thereby displaying the complex references that led to his current series of works. Painting, understood as a medium, is absolutely elemental for Arnd Kaestner's works, since it is the only possibility to give shape back to the impressions, happenings, and artists he analyzes. He counters the artistic/analytic/social/(metaphorical) process preceding his works with a technical production in an absurd way.

Arnd Kaestner [* 1961 in Hamburg], works and lives in Berlin.
Studied fine arts from 1983 to1986 at Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris
1999 Grundkreditbank award 1999/2000

We look forward to your visit! Josef Filipp, Michaela Rosbach, Jörg Rosbach
The gallery is open Tuesday - Saturday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.