Come and see … Gert und Uwe Tobias

Our image of a both myth-laden and sentimentalized, kitschy world hovers between places such as Brasov and names such as the malevolent Count Vlad and Transylvania – for us a world apart. Gert und Uwe Tobias spent part of their childhood there before emigrating from Romania to Germany as Transylvanian Saxons.
Entitled »Come and see before the Tourists will do – The Mystery of Transylvania«,  the sheets of their 26 part series of woodcuts measure 2010 mm by 1800 mm respectively and are sawn out in the manner of fretwork and then the individual forms are pressed together in a series of different procedures. And so once again they manage to blend everything for us that we couldn’t quite piece together: cliché, post-punk, folklore, ornament, figure. Staple components are titles, sentences, letters – and it’s here, with a little practice, that you can strike it lucky: The Bat Whispers, Dracula’s Dog, I was a teenage Vampire, Dracula vs. Frankenstein … Each and every title represents an even more ghastly film of one and the same horrifying thought.
The eponymous artist’s edition – the very first publication for the twins – with its rough but charming cloth binding, juxtaposes the search for evidence with the results of the printing. So it is not merely to be viewed as a stylistic pot-purri, but also as a disparate perception of a particular area, which can still be counted amongst the most beautiful and elemental in Europe.