Arnd Kaestner »tapes vol.2«
March 8—April 19, 2008
Opening: Saturday, March 8, 7 pm

We are pleased to announce the showing of »tapes vol.2«, Arnd Kaestner’s second solo exhibition at Filipp Rosbach Galerie. You and your friends are cordially invited to attend the opening at 7 pm on Saturday, March 8. A private preview will be held from 11 am to 6 pm on opening day.

With this exhibition, Arnd Kaestner, born in 1961 in Hamburg, takes up the thread of his series »Tapes«, which he showed in 2005 in Berlin. The choice of titles makes use of the name of everyday cultural production forms. »Vol. 2« loudly calls hello to us from the music or film industry, where this term always means the continuation of a successful idea, a profitable production, or simply the further pursuit of good material.

Kaestner enjoys dealing with things from everyday life. But not with the aim of filling the abstract concept of the everyday with concrete content or of replacing it. Rather, he seeks to pay homage to the elements that make everyday life visible and sensually experiencable in all their beauty and complexity. The first intellectual meters already suggest that the focus will be on seeming; the title »Tapes« as well as the works that bring the title to life are only apparently everyday. Of course, they are concretely everyday—the term and the thing itself are used too frequently and usually.

Formally, the works of the »Tapes« series are aesthetic analyses of diverse and thereby more or less familiar barrier tapes that seem to be wound around the work. But—and this is of elemental significance—they are painted. Elemental because the artistic use of everyday objects absolutely requires their translation into the respective language of the arts. Beyond that, the process of experience plays another elemental, if not the main role. Observing, considering, grasping, describing, and processing are thereby the stations in the sequence of Kaestner’s activity.

But it immediately becomes substantive, because – based in an important function of barrier tapes, namely to focus attention on a special point or thing—Arnd Kaestner’s interest is also in objects, which means two things. First, the artist is interested in things and not in nature. Second, the things are abstract results of the world that can often be used in a very concrete way. And in turn, carrying out these functions means being able to take the path of the highest degree of abstraction. The idea, sheerly omnipresent in everyday life, of surveying and thinking through the world, finds its whispering-shouting correspondence in the way things turn toward the world and are simultaneously silent.
—Florian Rehn

Arnd Kaestner [*1961 in Hamburg] lives and works in Berlin
1983–1986 Studies at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris
1999 Grundkreditbank Award 1999/2000

The gallery is open Tuesday to Saturday from 11am to 6pm.
Josef Filipp, Michaela Rosbach, and Jörg Rosbach look forward to your visit.
For additional information and privat viewing by appointments, call: [0]172. 373 11 10