Elmar Lause

The current exhibition of Elmar Lause at Galerie Affenfaust „The Gronkshow III- Das Gegenständliche siegt“, deals mainly with the portrayal of the human face. This is shown mostly with his typical „Gronks“. Deformed and absurd, often reduced to eyes, nose and mouth, the faces emerge from most diverse materials, like comiceyes and letterings, glueremains and buttons. Sometimes funny, sometimes rough and brutal, almost always ironic and ambivalent, Lause plays his game with proportions.
Next to these absurd portraits one can see mystic acrylic paintings from wolpertinger-like animals, living in surreal timeless-looking universes and besides that, also works from his latest series, the „Flatterbandphase“. Here, Lause got inspired by barrier tape, which is used to cordon areas. He mixes the signal colours yellow and black into lucid shades of green. Even old art historically works, like Caspar David Friedrichs' „Das Eismeer“, are brought into a current context.

Elmar Lause is a master of collage and of the alienation of the known in several aspects: many of his works are actual collages made of different materials, brought on canvas or put together as sculptures. But also in his paintings he uses this technique while using pledges of various imageries, like comics, videogames, art and grafitti and combining them into new creatures and worlds. Because of these new combinations of already known things, he primarily creates a moment of recognition, which then is followed by a distanciation. Therefore he´s manipulating the usual and forcing the viewer to look at it from a different perspective.

Elmar Lause, born 1973 in Bochum, lives and works in Hamburg since 1977.
In his paintings, collages, sculptures and photo-overpaintings, the most diverse elements of our reality are being superposed. Timeless and acutal matters merge into fantastic, bizarre and absurd enactments. That, which is familiar and self-evident to our visual memory, becomes alienated because of his innovative combinations.

Text: Judith Hofer