Artists

Matthias Groebel

Press release

Schiefe Zähne is pleased to announce chemical, Matthias Groebel’s second exhibition with the gallery.

In the late 1980s, figures and faces first appeared in Matthias Groebel’s works, as he began combining photo-emulsion techniques with oil painting, preceding his now widely exhibited machine paintings. With the proliferation of pocket-sized point-and-shoot cameras, Groebel started to document his immediate surroundings. These snapshots included urban landscapes, anonymous passersby, a riled-up audience at a punk concert, as well as staged still lifes and intimate moments among friends. They capture a divided nation – economically prosperous yet culturally repressed – the mundanity of the public realm and its brewing subcultural undercurrents.

The works on view reflect and are equally a product of their historical and cultural context. Attuned to the rage and tenderness intertwined in ecstatic bodies, Groebel portrays a sense of postmodern ennui and an understanding of alternative spaces as information systems that circumvent official institutions. Made on the brink of the information age, these early works reveal Groebel’s developing sensitivity to the collective psychology of an era, a theme that would later crystallise in his renowned TV paintings.