Tobias Spichtig | Taxi zur Kunst | Contemporary Fine Arts (CFA Berlin) | 02.05.-31.05.2025

until 31.05. | #4691ARTatBerlin | Contemporary Fine Arts presents from Friday, 2nd May 2025 the exhibition „Taxi zur Kunst“ by the artist Tobias Spichtig.

Contemporary Fine Arts is delighted to open the third solo exhibition by Swiss artist Tobias Spichtig entitled Taxi zur Kunst at this year’s Gallery Weekend Berlin. With this exhibition, he is expanding his painting spectrum to include a new genre: the group portrait. Taxi zur Kunst is an ode to art itself – an exploration of the classic pictorial categories of painting.

Taxi zur Kunst began with a wish and a joke. CFA has occupied the back page of Texte zur Kunst magazine for years, and Spichtig has wanted to advertise the title ‘Taxi zur Kunst’ there for years. A perfect match. A taxi, nostalgically charged, a means of transport that takes us to openings, readings, theatres and concerts. You sit in it, the world passes by, waiting for what comes next. Spichtig sees a similar nostalgia in painting. ‘The process is a bit like a joke. A magical joke.’ For him, nostalgia is not a sentimental retrospective, but a necessity. A longing for the seemingly familiar, the known that cannot be fully grasped. In this sense, painting is a taxi. The view out of the window, the passing, the anticipation.

A turning point in the reception of Tobias Spichtig’s artistic work was marked by the solo exhibition Everything No One Ever Wanted at Kunsthalle Basel in winter 2024. A first institutional exhibition was presented in which painting was made the main protagonist and was juxtaposed with a series of sculptures and a sound installation.

Spichtig’s portraits are characterised by an interplay between closeness and absence as well as the personal and the anonymous. The subjects have been reduced to the essentials in rough lines, sometimes angular, sometimes sharpened, so that their essence is manifested in a mannerist manner. Not only have the protagonists been outlined in black, but black has also been added to the more colourful details. The dark, exaggerated eyes of the muses make it impossible to decide whether they are staring or not. Large eyes create a strange effect, as if too much mascara had been applied or as if the holes in skulls were being evoked. Empty, large eyes reinforce an almost meditative gaze inwards and outwards. The effect is reminiscent of earlier ‘sunglasses pictures’: Photographs of dark lenses on monochrome oil backgrounds. The viewers were expected to see a reflection of themselves in the lenses, but this did not materialise.

This ambivalence of intimacy and distance has also been continued in the nude paintings, in which androgynous, morbid beings have been depicted crouching or standing in front of colourful, multi-layered backgrounds – they have been given both an inviting and distanced effect, leaving an impression of being lost in themselves. A feeling of alienation has been left behind, created by the confrontation with these night creatures, the hard lines and the deliberately eliminated depth.

A stylistic reference to both Bernard Buffet and the German Expressionists, in particular Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, has been imposed. Even if historical analogies are academically frowned upon, both the existentialism of the post-war period and the ‘dance on the volcano’ feeling of the Weimar Republic have been recalled, as similarities with the current feeling of the times have been noted. Furthermore, a proximity to both historical movements has been recognised in Spichtig’s absolute contemporaneity.

Spichtig sees himself as a realist. He paints what surrounds him: His muses have included his friends, his family and the extravaganza with which time has been spent. In this attitude, he has been credited with a similarity to Andy Warhol, whom he admired – both in his choice of subjects and in his appropriation of the portrait genre.

In ‘Taxi to Art’, new images have been shown that may have followed the vague narrative of a concert, a theatre or an exhibition opening: a taxi driver, people at dinner, a dancer on the way home, a kiss, a posing band, night owls hugging or standing in line. However, this narrative has not been taken literally – rather, we have been invited to follow it with a smile, in the knowledge that what has been shown is more of a loose game with motifs that are representative of the course of life. In this way, an existentialist quality has been ascribed to each picture. A resonance of the images has been established precisely at this point, writes Barlow: ‘between embarrassment and seriousness, humour and melancholy, honesty and deception, closeness and distance.’

Art is understood in a refusing relationship to society, politics and the economy, which has been made particularly clear in the art movements that have emerged in times of crisis. For this reason, it is seen as political. In this refusal, Tobias Spichtig has been in search of beauty, as he has affirmed in personal conversations. With an awareness of the embarrassment of this vain endeavour, he works between ambition and ironic distance. It is precisely this momentum that has been inscribed in his pictures, balancing on this fine line.

Tobias Spichtig, born in 1982 in the canton of Lucerne (Switzerland), lives and works between Zurich and Berlin. He has had numerous international exhibitions, including solo shows at renowned institutions such as the Kunsthalle Basel, the Swiss Institute in New York, Kaleidoscope Spazio Maiocchi in Milan, the Centre d’art contemporain in Delme, SALTS in Basel and the Museum Folkwang in Essen.

Opening: Friday, 2nd May 2025, 6pm – 9pm

Exhibition dates:: Friday, 2nd May until Saturday, 31st May 2025

Image caption Title: Tobias Spichtig, Copyright © 2025 Contemporary Fine Arts, All rights reserved.