Wolfgang Ellenrieder »my private 2nd life«
April 28 to June 16, 2007
Leipzig Gallery Weekend:
Saturday, April 28 from 11am to 9pm | 10pm party in Bimbo Town
Sunday, April 29 from 11am to 6pm
New exhibitions in all the galleries in the »Baumwollspinnerei« [former cotton spinning mill]

We are pleased to present »my private 2nd life«, a solo exhibition by Wolfgang Ellenrieder, at Filipp Rosbach gallery. The Munich painter Ellenrieder [*1959] has recently had solo exhibitions in Belgium, Holland, and Germany.

Rick Vercauteren, Director of the Museum Van Bommel van Dam in Venlo [NL]:

As I was standing in Wolfgang Ellenrieder's studio in Munich last year and taking stock of his recent works, the opening lines of »Parallel Universe« came to mind; the swinging song on the CD »Californication« by the Red Hot Chili Peppers: »Deep inside of a parallel universe it's getting harder and harder to tell what came first.« Ellenrieder's oeuvre is more than anything a provoking blend of painting, photography, video and computer animations. To create his complicated compositions that seems to refer to aspects from a microcosm as well as elements from a macrocosm, he uses pictures from computer archives, magazines and worldwide stock photographs as much as works by himself that he photographs with digital camera, manipulates on his PC and later partially - or even paints over completely. His paintings are further characterized by a personal palette of many subtle shades of brown, blue, yellow, green, grey purple and pink. When rendering anorganic and organic motives he also opts for unexpected camera angels, unusual frames and opposed perspectives. Using this wide-ranging repertory of pictorial means, Wolfgang Ellenrieder in an ingenious way is luring unsuspecting viewers inside wayward, parallel worlds. These carefully thought out constellations in paint function, figuratively speaking, as conceptual traps that compel spectators to reflect on topics such as imagination and prejudice, true, as well as supposed, identity, original and copy: »Once they're mentally trapped in my world, people will start to wonder what came first: truth or entertainment?«

Wolfgang Ellenrieder's paintings, whether small-format or of enormous size, all have one thing in common: The viewer is truly immersed in the realm between apparent reality and implicit fiction.

Publication:
»Wolfgang Ellenrieder_parallel«| Kerber Verlag Bielefeld and Leipzig 2006 | published by Stefan Wimmer | German/English 96 pp., 66 color ills. | Texts by Barbara Auer, Stephan Berg, Joachim Jäger, Ulco Mes, Wolfgang Ullrich und Rick Vercauteren. ISBN 978-3-938025-97-0.
30,- €

The exhibition is open Tuesday to Saturday from 11am to 6pm
For additional information and viewing appointments, call: 0172. 373 11 10.
Josef Filipp, Michaela Rosbach, and Jörg Rosbach look forward to your visit.