Björn Holzweg

From 10.05. till 31.05.2014 the current exhibition „Sherwood Forest“ of Björn Holzweg will be shown at Affenfaust Galerie. With real trees, sculputres and a lot of colour, Holzweg creates an extensive installation. As the title already leads to assumptions the visitors are lured into an abstract forest.

By entering the galery one´s leaving the urban space and immersing in another reality. The forest as such is a diverse symbolic charged sphere. So is the „Sherwood Forest“, known for Robin Hood and his allies, it is symbol for the fight against oppresion, for revolution and riot against social injustice. For todays metropolitan the forest is a strange and mystic realm. On one side recreational area, while delighting in nature, on the other side the fully autonomous functioning ecosystem contains unknown and perhaps dangerous things. Here humans are always intruders. In Holzwegs black and white forest the inhabitants are hiding and seem to observe the visitors. Fox, badger and bear are the only splashes of colour in the installation. The artist makes use of classical notations of heromemorials. The busts in heroic manner appeal like icons. They are produced in finest handwork out of Keramiplast, a clay-alike material. The portraits are structured with precise triangels which are painted with acrylic colour. The triangels, the simplest possible figures made of lines in a plane, play with the surface by taking it apart and at the same time holding it together. The images of animals remind the viewer of an often forgotten, but coexisting real world that subsists beyond the urban habitat.

Björn Holzweg, born 1979 in Leipzig, lives and works in Hamburg since 2004. His paintings, sculptures, drawings and aquarelles are mainly shaped very graphically. He deals a lot with simple geometrical figures. For him, they are symbollic for our society: calculating, repeating and everlasting. With repetitive arrangements of those, he creates new spaces and dimensions. Thereby he breaks away from conventional image builups with vanishing points. Holzwegs art isn´t interested in one kind of message. Instead he wants to adress the most diverse types of people and study their different reactions to his works.

Text: Judith Hofer