Boris Doempke
30.10. – 30.12.2018
Boris Doempke is a painter and sculptor. Simultaneity is the overarching theme of his work and forms an Ariadne’s thread that runs through and characterizes his work. Simultaneity is the simultaneity of opposites, contradictory events, phenomena and experiences. Opposites that develop their own dynamic, that coexist, intertwine and can in turn cancel each other out. Boris Doempke brings together things that one would not expect to belong together. Strictly speaking, it is paradoxes that take on a specific form in his work. Without obtrusiveness or showmanship, but rather skillfully and subtly, events that do not follow one another in time or space are brought together in a picture or installation. This creates a sphere of complex simultaneity of events, which Doempke questions and negotiates in his works. His art illustrates the simultaneity of a dynamic of contradictory events and impressions that make up the multi-layered facets of the reality of our lives.
“What do I do with color in space”? “How do I transport the pictorial and formal world of painting into real space”? “How do I interweave two- and three-dimensionality”? - These are questions that Boris Doempke asks himself. Questions around which his investigations revolve and which are constantly brought to bear anew in various groups of works. Doempke transfers elements of the pictorial into space. The pictorial and formal world of painting is transported into real space, image and space, two- and three-dimensionality are simultaneously intertwined, “3zu2 Space and Image”, which is also the title of the exhibition. These works are neither sculpture nor painting, neither one nor the other, rather they are conceived across genres and function as hermaphrodites with their own formal language. Paradoxes are given a simultaneity: simultaneity becomes an artistic grammar and is the focus of his aesthetic strategies.
The site-specific installation at the Kunstverein Bremerhaven continues the “Tales of space” group of works and confronts the viewer as a hanging sculpture and a network of lines in space. Floating colors and an expansive structure are the defining elements of this installation.
A fragile structure made of red and white painted wooden rods of varying thickness and length, sometimes straight, sometimes curved, which is attached to a few points on the walls and ceiling of the room. The work developed for the Kunstverein derives its form from the dialog with the architecture, from the spatial environment, which does not function as a backdrop but becomes an integral part of the work.
The relationship between the work and the viewer is dynamic; the respective image of the work changes as the viewer moves around the space. Installations are always conceived from the image; they oscillate between the second and third dimension. Painting is spatialized, thus transferring the pictorial into space. His spatial works are an arrangement of material in space and at the same time an image in space. If a view is pictorially dominant, a motoric of constantly changing images is created in the spatial pacing.
In his paintings, Boris Doempke deals with the conditions of spatiality, simultaneity and the diversity of today’s reality. The formal language often refers to our urban reality shaped by technology and media. His paintings are dynamic, the structure of the canvases irritates the viewer’s eye and forces it to wander back and forth on the surface in order to grasp the changing entanglements. Doempke confidently translates extra-pictorial experience and perception of urban and digital spaces into inner-pictorial structures. His works thus aim at reality and are at the same time an abstraction of this reality.
Born in 1955, Boris Doempke studied art in Münster and Berlin, was a master student and co-founder of the producer gallery “Der Standort - Raum für Installation” in Berlin and co-curator of the Förderverein Aktuelle Kunst in Münster. He lives in Bremerhaven and Münster. An expansive installation from the “Tales of space” series can be seen at the Kunstverein, as well as paintings from the “City scans” and “Screenland” groups of works, wall reliefs and works on paper.
Dr. Joachim Kreibohm
Curated by Thomas Trümper.