Galerie Max Hetzler is pleased to present new paintings by Bart Domburgat the Zimmerstraße Gallery.
In his earlier work, Bart Domburg was engaged in painting portraits of friends, where different formal possibilities and painting styles ( for example close-ups or blow-ups ) have been tested, as an attempt to extend the traditional view of this form of painting. Since a couple of years - also affected by the artist´s move to Berlin and the particular history of the city - his paintings refer to specific locations or landscapes with a certain historical, political or religious impact. Bart Domburg visited these sites and landscapes and took photographs. The dispassionate naturalistic translations of these photographs into painting stay in a special tension towards his emotionally charged subjects such as the location of the Berlin Wannsee-Konferenz.
In the new work the specific reference to a location shifts more and more to the background, this is also indicated by the exhibition title Überall (Everywhere). Now, still a lot of architectonical and landscape elements are visible, but the real existence of the painted site become less obvious. This is particularly underlined in the Diaspora series which depict anonymous landscape.
Despite the discussion of history – especially in their extreme and destructive scale - a change on the level of the painterly execution takes place. Although Domburg´s general painting style stays intact, slight alterations appear. In the windows of a painted building, concrete things like trees are mirrored on the one hand, but on the other hand the viewer recognizes in another window only coloured streaks. By this, a thrilling play with different perspectives, movements, reflections and dynamics appears.
This effect is especially apparent in the new landscape paintings depicting a snowy field, an open horizon and a kind of stone desert. Here, the formally intact naturalism is interferred. The paintings build an atmosphere where dissolution and disintegration takes place. In the case of the stone landscape the viewer can even perceive ´abstraction´ if he faces the painting closely.
According to Bart Domburg, his new paintings examine how „an abstract painting can be done by realistic means". Moreover, the appearence of purely painterly sections into the realism of the picture leads to the principal question of the painted reality itself, and the general possibilities of representation. Bart Domburg confronts the viewer in his paintings with these questions in a liberating and fascinating multitude of facets.
Bart Domburg, born in 1957 in Zwolle, Netherlands, lives and works in Berlin. This is his second solo show at Galerie Max Hetzler.
For further information please contact the gallery under 030 229 24 37 or visit our website at www.maxhetzler.com.
Opening hours: Tuesday to Saturday, 11am – 6pm.
