JAN MUCHE + FRITZ BORNSTÜCK: STÜCKE AUF PAPIER

Fritz Bornstück and Jan Muche live as painters, draughtsman and sculptors in Berlin. They both studied at the University of the Arts and for many years they have been cultivating an artistic friendship. Brought together by Alexander Ochs, they are shown jointly for the first time. Furthermore: for the paper positions they created joint paper works. The background to this collaboration was the maxim of the exhibition organizers to show only one picture in the catalog per exhibitor, one maxim that for Bornstück and Muche was a ‚no-go’.

This resulted in works that act like the perfect synthesis of two completely differing visual languages:

Jan Muche deals with suprematist structures and architectural all-over compositions, while Bornstück likes to fill the universal composting grounds of his ‚Wastelands’ with songbirds, to give the whole a narrative turn. The appropriation of the elements of the others take place playfully and light-heartedly: Bornstück’s tendrils and birds overgrow Muche’s architectures and together form entirely new associative spaces. Muche’s geometric elements not only form a steady built foundation for the visual space, but they almost loosen the mystical Bornstück’s narrations and lead a wonderfully cryptic independent existence, such as for instance the notorious ‚Party-Raute’.

In addition, ALEXANDER OCHS PRIVATE also presents solo positions of the two artists. The pieces by Bornstück open the view into largely impassable, waste grounds. These are compositions of overgrown remains of a consumptive and festive throwaway society. We could see those tacks of everyday objects in the environs as a representative of human presence and at the same time of (art) historical reference system. Freed from its original functions, the cubic forms of bulky refrigerators and architectural structures lead the eye on the wrong path in the visual space. In the picture depth, dusky blues and greens give the painting a pregnant and melancholy silence, while in the foreground an overwhelming entanglement of floral-ornamental and constructivist elements invites you to lose yourself in the picture. The wastes of pop culture, apparent re-conquered from nature, become now a new habitat for native and exotic songbirds, insects and other animals. In English one translates ‚Brache’ as ‚Wasteland’ which triggers completely different associations.

Although his paintings look very picturesque at first glance, they are collages. Pigmented pieces and scraps of paper, threads and adhesive, play a role in the composition of the picture, as do more classic painterly gestures such as brush strokes and color gradients.

In his painting on canvas, Jan Muche also cultivates the method of collage, which can be seen in the background of his works on paper. Strongly colored motifs, reminiscent of the beginning of modernity, constructivism and suprematism, convey an idea of lightness in the „now“ through the translucent, watercolored application of paint. Unlike Bornstück, Muche does not really want to tell anything in his pictures. “A picture”, says the artist, “stands for itself, that’s why it is a picture”. Muche, too, likes to be the ‚exploiter of the waste of modernity’ and at the latest here it comes to the intended, also content-related contact with the ‚pieces’ of a Fritz Bornstück.