Trak Wendisch | Trak Wendisch – Part I | Galerie Tammen | 20.10.-11.11.2023

until 11.11 | #4065ARTatBerlin | Galerie Tammen shows from 20th October 2023 the exhibition “Trak Wendisch: Part I” with object paintings and sculptures by the artist Trak Wendisch.

Trak Wendisch is an authentic personality – searching, enthusiastic, critical. Various breaks in the development of his work underline his desire for research, for trying things out, for analysis. “An unchanged personal style is a subtle form of deprivation of freedom,” he lets slip. “In order to formulate certain new ideas, I inevitably need new kinds of material,” the artist emphasises. One would think that this requires his collectors to go along with him to a certain extent.

His latest works stand at the intersection of painting, relief, object-picture, assemblage and sculpture. The series “Statt” (since 2020, with about 20 paintings so far) deals with alienated aspects of digitalisation and the problems that AI poses for humanity. “Statt” is a sprawling collage system of cut-up circuit boards, motherboards of personal computers, stabilised on honeycomb core boards and mounted on carpenter’s boards, partly set with acrylic.

Trak Wendisch, Industrial III, 2022, Mischtechnik auf Wabenplatte, 100 x 90 cm

Art thrives in a jungle of quotations. There is hardly a new work of art that does not refer to others and incorporate their DNA into its own. But unlike the electronic scrap hobbyists interested in pretty figurativeness, Trak Wendisch is not interested in wall decoration. He is less concerned with the appearance of a cityscape, for example, than with fundamental questions of our “post-biological age”. Wendisch counters the exaggerated expectations of the future with his aesthetic argumentation. He distances himself from the idea of placing a computer simulation above human intelligence. What he stages is the image-based awareness that it would already be necessary now to take final leave of a hubris.