Gesamtkunstwerk: New Art from Germany Review

THE Gesamtkunstwerk exhibition is currently the reigning feature of the Saatchi Gallery, with its vivid colours and mind-tingling textures that aim to estrange the observer. Forget sights for sore eyes – the ‘New Art from Germany’ covers a range vast enough to make your eyes sore.’

Gallery 1 is home to Marcus Selg’s supernatural creations. Amidst the bounty of colour are the twisted, unnerving expressions of the subhuman, a running motif for many of the featured German artists.

André Butzer follows Selg with a series of giant oil on canvas paintings. The vibrancy of each piece is startling, particularly as the mass of swirling unnatural faces evoke alien emotions with their half-real expressions. In gallery 3, Isa Genzken follows suit. The room is a mishmash of bric-a-brac turned sculpture, a cemetery of neon, plastics, faces and glass. 

Isa Genzken, Geschwister, 2004

Each piece represents a kind of storage of keepsakes combined with the undercurrent of various ideologies. She uses the things we recognise, a wheelchair for example, and transforms them so that they resemble the remains of a personality. She uses the materials we rely on and the materials we think we love, offering an alternative perception in a bid to readjust the boundaries of beauty and universal value.

Gert & UWE Tobias’s coloured woodcuts on paper share the visually invasive quality of Genzken’s sculptures. Once again the pieces make use of the shapes we recognise, yet keep us from digesting them through our fear of colour. They are abstract to say the least. Faces? Yes. Emotions? No. Lunacy runs rife in a haze of maddening smiles – circular, endless, unnerving.

Gert & Uwe Tobias, Untitled, 2007

Gallery 5 contains another version of texturized oil on canvas paintings, by Ida Ekblad. The stormy ‘Stalk Gills and Caps of Goodbye’ stands out as a piece with a kind of child-like fury attached to it. It represents the type of unrestrained outburst that remains indistinguishable after the moment it happened, like the ruins that remain after a brief encounter with a feeling stronger than willpower.

Alexandra Bircken’s use of the natural world shifts the theme of the exhibition from our knowledge of humanity to our relationship with nature. She brandishes natural forms with lashings of paint, dip-dyes apple cores and plant roots and pins the results to a metal frame. ’Drape’, creates the reverse effect by hanging dyed cloth to a tree branch construction She showcases a kind of flotsam and jetsam effect that asks, “when we collide with nature, what is left?”

George Herold’s giant body formation sculptures are show-stopping. Staying true to the power of colour, one of the two androgynous figures is a luminous orange and the other is a deep purple. Beside the figures is an oversized, shuddering mirror. Peering in, you see your reflection and become prevented from interpreting your own unstable expression. Your body becomes unfamiliar and  you flicker, on the edge of reality, like the changing shapes and faces of the exhibition.

Georg Herold, Untitled, 2010

To the left of the mirror lies Kirstine Roepstorf’s ‘It’s not the eye of the needle that’s changed’. Her use of material creates a layering, half exposing-half concealing, what lies beneath effect. We’re led to peer into the distance but are met with an impenetrable foil sky. The piece has a certain power over its observer, almost like a form of trickery through exposure. Thomas Zipp’s ‘Shwarze Balloons’ are also particularly powerful, as is Andro Wekua’s overwhelming ‘Sunset’.

Gesamtkunstwerk runs until 30 April 2012

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All photos courtesy of the Saatchi Gallery