Shop the Show: In a New Munich Exhibition, Four Artists Blur the Lines Between Reality and the Unconscious

“Restaging" at Filser and Gräf features work by Judith Grassl, Jan Rybnicek, Christian Probst, and Lukas Hoffmann.

Installation view "Restaging" 2021. Courtesy of Filser & Gräf. Photograph by Marc-Pascal Berger.

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What You Need to Know: Our dreams, their meanings, and how they relate to our waking lives are age-old fascinations. In “Restaging” at Munich’s Filser & Gräf, four contemporary artists—Lukas Hoffmann, Judith Grassl, Jan Rybnicek, and Christian Probst—conjure up the evocatively shifting boundaries between the subconscious and reality in painting, sculpture, and installations.

The exhibition, which is made possible through sponsorship by Stiftung Kunstfonds, Neustart Kultur, considers art as a playground of human imagination in which we can create transitional spaces or alternative worlds. “Re-staging” also considers the ways in which we might begin again as the world emerges from the pandemic, while simultaneously acknowledging the vague, indeterminate state of our current existences. 

Installation view "Re-inszenierung" 2021. Courtesy of Filser & Gräf.

Installation view “Restaging” 2021. Courtesy of Filser & Gräf.

Why We Like It: Acknowledging the uncertainty of what life will look like in the future, the participating four artists contribute artworks that evoke these “flux” experiences. Lukas Hoffmann’s installations create theater-like spaces, while Judith Grassl’s paintings emerge from an intuitive layered process in which elements seem to come apart and reassemble. Christian Probst reconsiders depictions of the human body creating forms that blend the familiar and the alien at times these figures are grotesque and at others times almost futurist in style. Lastly, artist Jan Rybnicek creates fictional hybrid beings that allude to famed works from art history while presenting them in new way. One work reinterprets the famed sculpture of the Capitoline Wolf, showing Romulus and Remus, but fragmented such that the viewer is asked to assemble the image from memory.

What the Gallery Says: “The reading of the concept for this particular exhibition refers to the transitional space, a level between illusion, dream, subconscious, and lived reality, which we all share to a certain extent. Art as a playground of human imagination and creativity can form another level, between this supposed reality and absolute fiction; all four positions show a kind of re-assemblage of the different elements. The exposition follows a similar pattern. Even though we are dealing with very unique artistic positions, the works merge with each other and turn the exhibition into a fictional space of experience,” wrote art historian Tinatin Ghughunishvili-Brück. 

 

Lukas Hoffmann
House on Sulphur (2020)
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Lukas Hoffmann, House on Sulphur (2020). Courtesy of Filser & Gräf.

Lukas Hoffmann, House on Sulphur (2020). Photograph by Marc-Pascal Berger. Courtesy of Filser & Gräf.

Jan Rybnicek
Brotherhood (2019)
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Jan Rybnicek, Brotherhood (2019) Photograph by Marc-Pascal Berger. Courtesy of Filser & Gräf.

Jan Rybnicek, Brotherhood (2019) Photograph by Marc-Pascal Berger. Courtesy of Filser & Gräf.

 

Christian Probst
Untitled (2021)
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Christian Probst, Untitled (2021) Photograph by Marc-Pascal Berger. Courtesy of Filser & Gräf.

Christian Probst, Untitled (2021) Photograph by Marc-Pascal Berger. Courtesy of Filser & Gräf.

 

Judith Grassl
Four Rooms I (2021)
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Judith Grassl, Four Rooms I (2021). Photograph by Florian Huth. Courtesy of Filser & Gräf.

Judith Grassl, Four Rooms I (2021). Photo by Florian Huth. Courtesy of Filser & Gräf.

 

Restaging” is on view at Filser & Gräf through October 30. 2021. 


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