»From our advertising«: Graduates of the HfG Offenbach

For the first time this year, works from three years of graduation in 2018 and 2019 will be shown in a comprehensive show in the HfG-Kunsthalle am Hafen. The media spectrum of the works ranges from painting and drawing, sculpture and sculpture to photo and video installations, kinetic objects and material experiments, and enables a differentiated insight into and overview of artistic developments at the HfG. Transitions between individual media, between two- and three-dimensional manifestations, and increasingly between analog and digital spheres are carried out here with great self-evidence and sovereignty, which shows an early independence of the young artistic positions and, last but not least, is central to the interdisciplinary self-understanding of the teaching at the HfG that goes back to the Bauhaus. 

The exhibition accommodates large-format works as well as small-scale serial approaches, some of which seem almost archival, whose strength is due to the special powers of observation of the artists. Many of the positions shown develop a very personal approach to their immediate surroundings. The works of the artists deal in detail with everyday encounters, objects, memories and visual phenomena, without however merging into a mere record of their surroundings.

In Sarah Schweizer's work, for example, architectural elements from the university building become motifs for almost ritual-looking pictorial objects. Juliane Kutter's conceptual photo series offers an examination of the ways in which different individuals deal with their own photographic counterparts. In Nina Wood's typographic work, too, personal experiences in the interpersonal realm form the basis for a delicately designed booklet in which the turning and turning of individual pages, as well as the wandering of the gaze in the spaces between them, takes on a special meaning. Sculptural confrontations with everyday materials and utensils such as Tilmann Aechtner's clumsily dancing packaging cartons, Max Brück's oven sculpture, and Ishkhan Nazaryan's hybrid arrangements of ornamental wooden elements and blue plastic segments bear witness to surreal humor. The paintings of Yong-Kang Yuan or Imke Greitzke are based on essentially everyday situations and sensations, which, with great intensity of color, are alienated into the fantastic and abstract, thus opening up atmospheric spaces, which at the same time spread from the canvas to their viewers in a disturbing and fascinating way. 

The diversity of artistic positions is given a generously proportioned stage in the spacious rooms of the new HfG-Kunsthalle. Here the spatial presence of the individual works can develop and at the same time enter into formal and content-related associative neighborhoods with the works of the other graduates of the HfG.

Artists

Tilmann Aechtner, Isabel Blumenthal, Max Brück, Lucia Bushart, Jonas Englert, Julie Gaston, Max Geisler, Imke Greitzke, Juliane Kutter, Matthias Lawetzky, Johannes Lenzgeiger, Jingsi Li, Ishkhan Nazaryan, Young Eun Park, Isabel Scheid, David Schießer, Sarah Schweizer, Dennis Siering, Kathrin Stößer, Nina Wood, Yong-Kang Yuan