Nothing is burning, nothing is boiling over

So first we run from Cologne to Heilbronn, then to Berlin and now to New York, where the twins Gert & Uwe Tobias are represented with a first solo exhibition at a showroom of the Museum of Modern Art.
It doesn’t happen every day that one can be successful internationally within such as short space of time with works originating in the world of printed graphics. However, both artists are relaxed about it all – as is always the case when someone succeeds in revivifying and remodelling a medium long believed to be extinct, in this case the woodcut. For instance, by extending the format, a compositional space is created that this medium normally lacks. And so the abstract and figured individual elements, applied in many-layered process, come to the fore in a strangely distorted and half-open space. When viewing the respective compositions in their entirety the erstwhile characteristic, hand-made impression disappears and formal and textual aspects come to the fore in Gert & Uwe Tobias’ implementations. Their individual provenance is extremely diverse, be they borrowings from constructivism or paraphrases from art history -– one is constantly confronted by a work abounding with pictorial motifs.
This current publication, entitled »Gert & Uwe Tobias«, presents the typewriter illustrations as well as free, expressive drawings for the first time. The drawing itself takes on the status of an independent work here, that is to say we are not dealing with preliminary sketches and the like. Perhaps that’s what one might have thought, for »nothing is burning, nothing is boiling over« as Gert & Uwe Tobias already called their exhibition in the Kunstverein in Heilbronn.

Exhibition:
Kunstverein Heilbronn, 23/03–20/05/07