Jan Brokof · woodcut/installation/drawing · and · Eckehard Fuchs · collage/painting
15.01.2005 – 17.03.2005
hinter fassaden
Jan Brokof · woodcut/installation/drawing · and · Eckehard Fuchs · collage/painting
15.01.2005 – 17.03.2005

Even though artist Jan Brokof increasingly works with installations, he is primarily a graphic artist whose preferred techniques include pencil, etching, tusche and especially woodcuts. Jan Brokof portrays people, animals, plants, the in- and outside of homes and interiors. Combined, these objects merge into somewhat laconic but also subtle visual worlds whose origins may indeed be found in the artist’s experiences and life. The works betray something of the mnemonic moments and biographic events. By reflecting, reducing some and concentrating on other details, the artist also mediates general situations, topics of social awareness such as the loss of identity and belonging, problems of integration and of dealing with the past, uniformity and the debasement of urban life.

For the exhibition “hinter fassaden” Jan Brokof takes a look behind the façade of a new building in Schwedt (a woodcut installation of ca. 530 x 450 cm which he showed as his diploma piece) and rebuilds one of the rooms to scale. Eighties’ pop icons form the decoration on one of the wall’s of this teenage room; woodcut-magazine posters give a feeling of the then-way of life. The view from the window however diminishes the viewer’s temporal distance and points towards anonymity and urban sterility.

 

In his collages, paintings and drawings Eckehard Fuchs depicts human portraits, or rather human figures entangled within a net of associations. The figures are always fitted into the format and mostly look out of the painting, thereby interacting with the viewer. Having said that, they seem hopelessly lost in self-contemplation. The artist often employs the hideous and shocking in order to narrate morale and emotions. Only rarely does Eckehard Fuchs employ descriptive attributes in order to portray relationships and situations of his own observation. It is the drastic and subtle gestures and the representation of partly exaggerated interactions between the protagonists which transport the thoughts and episodes.

Eckehard Fuchs’ figures are stiffly placed within the picture in a manner reminiscent of the Romanesque period, possess partly oversized heads as in the gothic style and present the spectator with a mirror in a kind of veristic outcry. His collages consist of drawings, in an adaptation of a paintbrush or pencil stroke the plane grows strip by strip, only to be underlined by the painter with intensive, strong colours borrowed from the medial colour scale.


Eckehard Fuchs · »Cube« · 33 x 19 1/2 in (84 x 49,5 cm) · collage, oil on paper · 2004

Eckehard Fuchs · »Seifenoper« · 33 x 19 1/2 in (84 x 49,5 cm) · collage, oil on paper · 2004

Eckehard Fuchs · »Entlassen« · 33 x 19 1/2 in (84 x 49,5 cm) · collage, oil · 2004

Eckehard Fuchs · »ZZ« · 33 x 19 1/2 in (84 x 49,5 cm) · collage, oil · 2004

Eckehard Fuchs · »HipHop« · 33 x 19 1/2 in (84 x 49,5 cm) · collage, oil · 2004

Jan Brokof · »Jugendzimmer« · 103 1/4 x 122 x 145 in (262 x 310 x 368 cm) · woodcut, installation · 2005

Jan Brokof · »Dresden Reick« · 7 3/4 x 11 1/4 in (20 x 28,5 cm) · ink on wood · 2004

Jan Brokof · »Madonna« · 16 1/3 x 11 in (41,5 x 28 cm) · woodcut · 2004

Jan Brokof · »Mann in U-Bahn« · 21 1/2 x 19 2/3 in (70 x 50 cm) · felt-tip-pen paper · 2004

Jan Brokof · »New kids on the Block« · 11 x 16 1/2 in (28 x 42 cm) · woodcut · 2004