1975 born in Meißen, Germany
1996-2001 Studies painting/graphic and other artistically media at the Academy of Fine Arts Dresden, Germany
2001-2003 further studies at Prof. Hans Peter Adamski at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Dresden
lives and works in Berlin
Prizes/grants
2006 New Talents Felloshipprogram on Art Cologne
2005 Grant by Käthe Dorsch Foundation Berlin
2004 Residency scholarship by Kulturstiftung of Saxony (Schloss Wiepersdorf)
2003 travel scholarship, Moskow
2002 New York fellowship by the German National Acadamic Foundation; Hegenbarth Fellowship for the project »No more heroes«
2000 German National Academic Foundation
solo exhibitions (Auswahl)
2010 »point of no return«, galerie baer, Dresden, Germany
2009 »Aspirin«, Galerie Koal, Berlin, Germany
2008 »Der Petzer«, galerie baer, Dresden; »Dirty Tricks«, Galerie Priska C. Juschka, New York, USA 2007 »Netto«, Galerie at the castle Senftenberg, Germany
2006 »Die Garage«, Delikatessenhaus Leipzig; »Puls und Blei«, Galerie Pankow Berlin (C); »brutstadt«, galerie baer, Dresden, Germany
2004 »Die Masse«, Künstlerhaus Schloss Wiepersdorf, Germany
2003 »Laufwerk Hauptstadt«, Leonhardimuseum Dresden, Germany (C)
2002 »like lead«, New York, USA
Participations (selection)
2010 »System« Städtische Galerie, Dresden; Germany; »Fred Rapid Glassworks«, Zero Fold, Köln/Autocenter, Berlin, Germany (C)
2009»All about...Dresden«, whiteBOX e.V., München, Germany; »Facebook«, The drawing lab, Berlin;»Formation 45x16x6,5 meter«, Halle 41, Berlin, Germany
2008 »Wasistdas?«, Loft 19, Paris, France; »Appell«, Verbeke Foundation, Antwerp, Belgium; »Hinterland«, Museum für Junge Kunst Frankfurt/Oder, Germany (invited by Jan Brokof); »Erwerbungen«, Städtische Galerie Dresden, Germany; »Appell«, Museum Felix de Boeck, Drogenbos, Belgium
2007 »Tokio Hotel«, Ostrale, Dresden »life worth dying for«, Wilde Gallery, Berlin, Germany
2006 group show, Galerie Noack, Mönchengladbach; »Wir haben keine Probleme«, Backfabrik Berlin; »today even the drawers are winners«, Klara Wallner Galerie, Berlin, Germany; »TinaB – Contemporary Art Exibition«, Prag, Czech Republic (C)
2005»Frühstück im Freien« (Wasteland), Kunstverein Rügen, Germany (C)
2004 »Lichter«, Großenhainer Str. 9, Dresden, Germany; »Schönheit – der Sprung im Spiegel«, Städtische Galerie Traunstein, Germany
2002 »Werkzeuge und Einheiten«, Berlin; »bilder«, Showroom Köln, Germany
2001 »The daily way«, Galerie NEON, Brösarp, Sweden; »Koch«, Mediaclub, Berlin, Germany; »Alice in change«, Oktogon Hochschule für Bildende Künste Dresden, Germany
2000 »FRANKFURT/OSTCLUB«, Galerie B, Frankfurt/Oder; »unplugged«, Galerie Hochschule für Bildende Künste Dresden, Germany; »Dem Deutschen Volk« temporäre Galerie, Dresden, Germany; »Spielstätte für Foxy Lady« Brösarp, Sweden
1999 »Stapeln und Folgen«, temporäre Galerie, Dresden, Germany; »DID das kollektive Ich«, Senatssaal Hochschule für Bildende Künste Dresden, Germany
Art fairs
2008 Art Cologne, Scope Basel, Preview Berlin
2007 Scope New York, Art Cologne, Scope Basel, Preview Berlin, Pulse London (with Galerie Priska C. Juschka, New York), Scope Miami
2006 Art Chicago, Preview Berlin, Art Cologne, Scope Miami
Bibliography
Kunsthalle whiteBOX (publisher): All about ... Dresden; Unterföhring 2009
Vereinte Dienstleistungsgewerkschaft (ver.di)/department 8 (media, art and industry) (publisher): Art+Culture (cultural and political journal); cover, p. 6,8,9,10,13; edition No. 3; Oktober/November 2008; Berlin 2008
Suzanne Tarasieve (publisher): Wasistdas; p. 8/9; Paris 2008
Ausrufer und Eckensteher, Sächsische Zeitung, 11.2.2008
Unterwegs in Dunkeldeutschland, DNN, 31.1.2008
Alles, nur nicht leise, Die Welt, 27.1.2007
Bezirksamt Pankow Berlin (publisher): Theo Boettger – Puls und Blei, Galerie Pankow, Catalog, Berlin 2006
galerie baer (publisher): Theo Boettger, Catalog, Dresden 2006
Prague Art Future (publisher): tina b – The Prague Contemporary Art Festival, Prag 2006
Kunstverein Rügen (publisher): Theo Boettger – the wasteland, Frühstück im Freien, Putbus 2005
Leonardi-Museum (publisher): Theo Boettger – Laufwerk Hauptstadt, catalog, Dresden
Theo Boettger: THE SNEAK
Theo Boettger’s Sneak is bald. With black tongue stretched out venomously and greedily staring bulging eyes, he drools at the thought of his next victim.
Every generation and society has its sneaks, inquisitors, informers, snitches, vilifiers and bullies. Sneaking can happen out of malice, envy and thirst for revenge. It can serve as an outlet for aggression or be motivated by moral convictions or social pressures. Sneaks always sneak on their own group and allow themselves to be used by employers and authorities for checking up on and penalising in-house or system-endangering misdemeanours.
Against a backdrop of global terror and fear of losing one’s job, sneaking is increasingly losing its moral taint. The Internet provides new dimensions in this respect. On websites such as www.verpetzt.de or www.anschwaerzen.de anyone can betray, condemn and insult his or her fellow humans under the cloak of anonymity and in uncensored form. Meanwhile, Süddeutsche Zeitung has introduced a “Sneak and Evaluate” function into its online forum to regulate the daily flood of unqualified reader comments.
Theo Boettger’s Sneak is joined by other dubious creatures: a neighbour with scarred face contorted in a grimace, pierced eyes and bared teeth; a bloody, battered, bent figure on his nocturnal way home; a tormented heap of flesh stretched out on a kerbstone with the bodiless legs of passers-by trampling indifferently over it.
Scarcely has one tried to relax and create a distance by drawing comparisons with the Expressionist metropolitan art of the 1920s but scraps of words like plus, reopening and big bladder drag you back to the here and now that Johannes Schmidt aptly described as the “pandemonium of modern life on the edge of the abyss.” Boettger paints the uncomfortably commonplace margins of our everyday life in an excessive, aggressive and authentically unattractive style with a great deal of black and blood red and all the less exuberant colours or areas of light. They include a supermarket checkout assistant, her body torn apart by shopping trolleys, extended opening times and screaming kids; a family whose supporting legs begin to totter badly while waiting in the job centre queue; they extend to rampant mass hysteria in the battle for the lowest prices at the Media Markt store opening.
Theo Boettger deals with areas of life of those failed or neglected in capitalism, who surround him daily and affect him personally. He does so with brushstrokes in oil, grotesquely distorted slogans and bulky layers of collage. He translates individual destinies and inferno-like mass battles into psychograms on canvas and wood. Boettger’s painterly realisations may be apocalyptically grim, but the circumstances he describes are perfectly normal everyday madness. His artistic commentary is more personal than political, never other-worldly, but in the midst of life – and close to the abyss.
(Text by Carla Orthen)
Deadly Serious
Dark, faceless ?gures, a bawling infant in a stroller, the company
logos of cheap discount stores, banker types, angry
people with tattoos, zombies with wrinkled faces and empty
eye sockets, stumbling people, falling people, people swept
away, crumbling houses, shreds of words, fragments of
people, lots of black and little colour – Theo Boettger creates
a pandemonium of modern life on the brink of the abyss
in his large-format watercolours. As an artist, he deals with
topics in everyday life by pitting himself against the demoralising
details of social inequities, the impertinence of the
media, and hopeless human fates.
In his pictures, he addresses exclusion, life balanced in the
margins and condemned there to desperation, explosion,
and failure. Black holes and spiral forms that have been incorporated
into the collage, bursts of black colour emanating
from ?erce brush strokes, chaotic compositions of simultaneous
actions – all of these endow the realistic elements in
the images with even greater intensity.
The artist eschews banal descriptions in his images, interrupting
his narratives with symbols and commentaries
comprised of word fragments, as if to slow down the viewer’s
observations by requiring a large amount of time for decoding.
For there is, in principle, nothing written in these
paintings that could not also be seen. Where people act like the black-and-white characters in a comic strip, one person
can be exchanged for the other; the stories in the speech
bubbles become a parallel reality that functions as a spark for
the painterly discovery of form.
For Theo Boettger, codi?cation does not mean disguising
facts. Even though many story sequences are given only in
fragments, a mood of grim critique always pierces through all
?lters of artistic alienation. Distance and identi?cation seem
to have congealed into a constant state of ?erce struggle with
one another. The artist does not allow himself the cool distance
of an analyst, nor does he deliver a plain and simple sociocritical
evaluation of the situation. His images derive their
clarity from the topicality of their subjects and their deep
seriousness, even though this seriousness also over?ows,
now and then, into hopeless gloom. Theo Boettger takes
advantage of only a fraction of the potential of the medium
in his watercolours, but he does so intentionally, reducing his
works to a few primary tones without any decorative smears
or ?owing colour gradients.
Simplicity of form is the goal; formal disquietude corresponds
to an authentic sense of agitation. The remnants of
the artist’s presence in the paintings – moist waves and blemishes,
drips of paint, black blots – attest to the intensity of
the process of creation and appear as marks of desecration
on the once – white paper. There is more than formal coquetry
with brutishness, fury, and rebelliousness resonating
in these paintings. Indeed, the interspersed words outline the path of a diffuse, cognitive march; yet they remain mere
intimations that never run the risk of congealing into slogans.
Like echoes, these words refer back to the fragmentary nature
of modern worlds of signs.
Artistic examinations of acute situations in society by means
of street observations have a rich historical tradition.
The high point of this tradition was, arguably, the urban
painting of Expressionism and Critical Realism in the 1920‘s,
which often derived the arc of tension in their narratives by
juxtaposing the rich and the poor, the seemingly limitless
possibilities for amusement in the city and the melancholy
of the individual in the crowd. It is possible to draw a direct
comparison between Theo Boettger’s paintings and these
traditions. Nevertheless, these works are missing the »lighter
side« almost completely, as if one had taken down all of the
radiant facades of the city, leaving behind only the featureless
quagmire of humanity in its bowels. The artist turns his
attention to the darkened realms, the splatter scene that is
everyday existence. Yet he does not do so with meticulous
descriptions and objective statistics. Rather, he uses images
to speak the language of what he represents. Boettger is gruff
and sarcastic, but never distant.
(Text by Johannes Schmidt)