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until 28.09 | #4373ARTatBerlin | Laura Mars Gallery shows from 31. August 2024 (Vernissage: 30.08.) the exhibition Suite Surprise by artist Robert Gfader.
The kitten is in a flush of yellow and even the little stand-up frame is staring at us with yellow polka-dot eyes. In the entrance hall, a group of nail varnish bottles are waiting to be used, while the rusty pedestal, which has seen better days, seems ready to take flight. Even in the supposedly monochrome black painted over folding mirror elephant, colorful oil paint shines through again and again in the scratched-out areas.
The inexhaustible potential of colors, whether as colorful woolen threads in a clamp frame or as ink injections directly into the wall, sometimes has an anarchic quality in Robert Gfader’s painting. Irons are used as painting spatulas and then bondag-style tied to an ironing board frame. Using oil paints, he repairs, glues and fixes, but also paints quickly and gesturally on canvas with his hands.
In 2004, Gfader had himself filmed during a performance in which, still in his pyjamas, he frenetically cleaned the floor of his Schindler Residency Apartment in L.A. down to the last corner.
Apart from the oil paints and canvases, almost all the materials in the exhibition are street or flea market finds. Through the daily collection of objects that appear interesting, which are cleaned, repaired and processed, an impressive archive has been created in his studio over the years, in which his own, purchased or found oil paintings and valuable design pieces live in a classless, peaceful community alongside discarded everyday objects and bric-a-brac.
The threat to this community was the central theme of his 2023 exhibition Wohnen oder Türmen in the Berlin project space Nationa museum (which has since also fallen victim to rampant gentrification). There, as in many earlier works, a large carpet was part of the installation. Carpets are sometimes used by Gfader as a painting surface, printed (as in the work New Old Carpet (2004) with the motif of a historical Indian carpet from the collection of the MAK in Vienna) or hung on the wall with a lace doily as a “pocket square”, as in Galerie A4, Innsbruck (2023).
The obviously intensively used carpet in Suite Surprise comes from the artist’s parents’ house in Tyrol and has been draped like a fan to form a kind of treasure island, in whose ravines the odd gold chain has disappeared. Another recurring motif in Gfader’s works are duplications, sometimes by copying, sometimes by painting the same motif with minimal variations. The two narrow embroidered pictures from anonymous hobby handwork with an actually identical, machine-printed motif differ on several levels: a slight deviation is initially created by the embroidery. Gfader adds a further dimension to the pictures by breaking through the pattern template through his free intervention with oil paint.
Suite Surprise is the artist’s first exhibition at the Laura Mars Gallery.
(Text: Bettina Klein)
Robert Gfader (*1967) studied architecture in Innsbruck and has lived in Berlin since 2004.
Vernissage: Friday, 30 August 2024 at 7 pm
Exhibition period: Saturday, 31. August until Saturday, 28. September 2024
To the Gallery
Image caption: © Robert Gfader, Laura Mars Gallery
Exhibition Robert Gfader – Laura Mars Gallery | Zeitgenössische Kunst Berlin | Contemporary Art | Exhibitions Berlin Galleries | ART at Berlin
