Haus am Waldsee is pleased to present, in Frank Nitsche, one of the most important contemporary German painters exhibiting at a Berlin art institution for the very first time. On his canvasses, the artist born in Görlitz in 1964 arranges the collision of the organic and the artificial. They are accompanied by works from the last ten years and complemented by two virtual spaces by the Swiss video artist Yves Netzhammer.

“Nitsche is an expert in the sort of abstract image content one would rather spare a picture (…) not painting that is about painting but a fickle anti-medium, constantly producing new deceits and disappointments from the genetic material of images.” (Gerrit Gohlke, Frank Nitsche, Cologne 2006, non-paginated)

On his canvasses, the artist born in Görlitz in 1964 arranges the collision of the organic and the artificial. His abstractions in strong greys and delicate pastel tones appear artificial and animated as if they were filtered from CAD scans. Constructs from lines and curves form absurd spaces of action leading into nothingness against a neutral backdrop. They reflect shattered glass and concrete walls. At the same time, they invoke the rampant sprawl of image production in our media- and design-obsessed times. Nitsche keeps an archive, ordered into albums, of photographs which reveal the artificial at the core of our information-based society in all its vehemence: dental transplants, wired-up newborns, devastating natural disasters, microbiological images of the smallest of life-forms, open spaces of virtual universes.

Moreover, at the foundation of these paintings are such shrill objects as beverage cans, rubber animals, spiked balls, stickers or caps of plastic bottles of all descriptions and colours that the artist collects and accumulates. Starting from these sources, Nitsche banishes the aggressive world of advertising into abstract image spaces. In doing so, he manages to capture in abstract terms the absurd upward spiral of a selfconsuming humanity and translate them, in time with the electronic rhythms he loves, into a highly condensed kind of painting.

“COCKTAILHYBRIDCONCEPT” shows mostly new works by Frank Nitsche. They are accompanied by works from the last ten years and complemented by two virtual spaces by the Swiss video artist Yves Netzhammer (born 1970 in Schaffhausen).

A catalogue will be published with Walther König publishers, Cologne, at € 16.80.