Ralf ZiervogelImmobilie

Sodom and Gomorrah: Here now a work of some importance is to be announced: Ralf Ziervogel, born in Clausthal-Zellerfeld in 1975, master student of Lothar Baumgarten in Berlin, has received, besides various scholarships (2003 and 2005 in New York), the Karl Schmidt-Rottluff Scholarship in 2006. Since 2001 he has exhibited regularly in galleries and has taken part in various international group exhibitions; already now he is represented with works in the collections of MoMA, the Deste Foundation Dakis Joannou in Athens, the Sammlung Olbricht in Essen and the Sammlung Falckenberg in Hamburg-Harburg. His most spectacular work as a draughtsman, entitled “Immobilie” and dating from 2004, now also forms the basis for the xerographs in this unusual book, which were taken directly from the original drawing in black ink, measuring 6.65 x 3.50 metres, and then xerographed according to the artist’s instructions. On closer inspection the extent of the infernal torment running through these depictions is immediately apparent. Once the viewer has recovered from the first shock, the eye travels quickly through the pages across which this infinite series extends sheet by sheet. With these technically extraordinary and brilliant drawings, however, we are dealing not with a grand narrative but with the depiction of an infinite series which takes up the theme of Eros and Thanatos while also allowing the subjects and executions of various models to be sensed, whether Aubrey Beardsley or Hieronymus Bosch, Egon Schiele or Robert Crumb. Ralf Ziervogel takes them up both within the picture and technically, letting them all appear in his comic-like and nonsensical cosmos, tearing at limbs, copulating or destroying the arm of a record player. His depictions draw the eye, and the viewer always tries in vain to find the resolution of this great disaster, this Comédie humaine.