MICHAEL SNOW
JEFF SCHER
PETER ROSEJEFF
TAKAHIKO LIMURA
BARBARA HAMMER
MATTHIAS GROEBEL
SEYMOUR CHWAST
NISI JACOBS

Matthias Groebel
Biography

MATTHIAS GROEBEL was born in 1958 in Aachen and currently lives and works in Cologne. He has used digital technologies for over ten years now. He is one the very few artists who has gone as far as designing and building his own digital devices that perfectly meet his artistic requirements. This gives his work a unique texture and sets him aside from other process-oriented painters.

Matthias Groebel made paintings for reading through its process as much as from the paintings themselves. Groebel sets up tensions that are a function of the seemingly oppositional techniques used in making the work; and along with many of his contemporaries, complex interplay between image and concept sets up paradoxes within the pieces. On another level, the work very definitely deals with areas that are being largely neglected in the visual arts currently. He is very interested in aspects of art history, and his work is anything but anti-intellectual. He is not interested in one-liners´ and as a practicing scientist as well as a painter; he wants to approach his work as an experiment with hypothesis, method, result, and conclusion. This makes for a welcome depth of engagement and debate for the audience. The tension created in Groebel´s work is one of its most significant features. The viewer is initially drawn into, what at first glance is an image/text piece. A playful invitation to search for the various canons typically present in that kind of work is presented, with questions being raised around whether the pieces are an inter-referential view of the art world, a political statement, a comment on consumerism, or an examination of the globalization of the media. Although Groebel's work is made up of stills grabbed from a screen, and the painting process is machine driven, it is very heavily interwoven with the textural and gesture nature of painting. The works function in relation to their existence as art objects with an author as much as to the techniques used and pluralistic subject matter and concepts present in the pieces.
(Excerpts from "Art in a complex system" by Helen Sloan)

Collective Memories is Groebel's first thematic show. All of the paintings originate in the tradition of the dance macabre, where skeletons awake to a grim liveliness. Visually, the paintings are striking demonstrations of the quality that can emerge from collaborations between man and machine. Conceptually, they are at the intersection of layer after layer of theories of memory, social history and social identity.