Untitled

15 November 2009 - 14 February 2010
 

Gert & Uwe Tobias present their recent work at Collezione Maramotti, an installation composed of twenty one pieces, from large size woodcuts to drawings and sculptures, placed inside a walldrawing covering all the walls of the exhibition space, in Max Mara's former manufacturing premises, now the Pattern Room. The exhibition will be accompanied by an artist's book .
As for all their previous installations, the Tobias brothers have created a poster, a large colour woodcut which symbolises their original way of making writing and images discoursing together. The poster becomes both an art piece, relating to other works on exhibit, and an advertising tool.

In their works, iconic elements, drawn from the popular culture of their country of origin, Transylvania, and images from European folklore, where archaic myths and traditions are transposed with strong naiveté and expressiveness, and often combined with decorative elements, seem to merge with immediacy in a formal contemporary language finding its roots in the early Modernism, in Klee, in Constructivism, in Art Brut, alongside folk culture.
In many of their typewritten drawings - associating sculptural patterns with embroidery – one may find elements from Eastern European Socialist architecture.
All this gives the work an extraordinary originality both formally - for its immediacy and at the same time its ironic post-modern penchant for quotation – and process-like, for the innovative use of media, like the technique of colour woodcuts for large-size pieces.
Besides the large woodcuts, where abstracts and figurative elements merge, Gert & Uwe Tobias create ceramic sculptures, works on paper (gouache, collage, typewritten and pen drawings) by also mixing diverse techniques and materials in a single work.
The artists use an unmistakable palette, intense and luminous, based on the process of colour layering strongly inspired by folklore, although totally devoid of any merely decorative purpose. The logical or totally illogical use of colours with respect to the image, is their ever-present peculiar trait.
The Tobias brothers work both together and separately, but they always sign together everything they produce. Their works, however created and produced, are the result of an extreme visual coherence, to the point that we may speak of perfectly matching visual imagination and formal identity.

Press-clipping selection

A. Smaldone, Gert and Uwe Tobias, in "Art Review", n. 39, Mar. 2010

M. Paderni, Gert & Uwe Tobias per la Collezione Maramotti, in "Arte e Critica", n. 61, Dec. 2009/Feb. 2010

S. Luppi, Twilight dalla Transilvania, in "Il Giornale dell'Arte", n. 293, Dec. 2009