Eight
Days A Week 2000 :
EUROCARD: TORSTEN
AND NINA IN LIVERPOOL : Torsten and Nina Römer
Cologne in Liverpool 6th October - 10th November, 2000
Graphic House, 7. October - 11. November 2000
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THE ART OF TORSTEN
AND NINA ROMER
One could say that Joseph Beuys' benevolent ghost brought these two
artists together. It happened in 15 February 1998, at the annual exhibition
at the Kunstakademie in Dusseldorf, where Beuys, the shaman of the
Lower Rhine once taught during the 1970s. The famous action in which
he explained his paintings to a dead hare might have been the impetus
for a conversation in which Nina asked Torsten to explain his paintings
to her. But Nina didn't have a hare. Instead, a frozen chicken was
used, bought from a fellow artist at a price of 5 Deutschmark. Since
that moment, everything has been clear for the two of them, in terms
of art as well as life. For two and a half years, Torsten and Nina
(nee Tangian) have been a couple. They have also been painting together.
But what unites the two students of the Dusseldorf Kunstakademie is
far stronger than that spirit of cooperation which once brought together
Picasso and Braque.
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In
many of these images the use of colour is largely intuitive. In
their common paintings, signs and patterns, abstraction and decoration,
gestures and sensual moments melt into one another. The two young
artists do not make use of any one consistent style. Abstract
motifs are overlapped by signs and blotches, all of which bleed
together. The multi-layered application of colour in oil, acrylic,
pigment, metal-paint and oil-pastel, results in interesting textures.
Sometimes paint is applied gesturally in manipulated "drips",
flowing out into veined, web-like patterns.If one looks to the
past for comparisons, one might say that these abstract images
with their finely veined, coloured surfaces, are not dominated
by the painterly radicalism and the gestural speed of a Jackson
Pollock. |
Instead, one
could find Jung's painted dreams, Gustav Klimt's love of ornamentation,
the intricacy of the Pre-Raphaelites, or the seductive surrealist
plasticity of Max Ernst. In confronting abstract expressionism, pop
art or geometric abstraction, Torsten and Nina Romer also draw upon
contemporary visual and auditory experiences, such as techno-culture,
digital images, graffiti, oriental ormentalism, psychedelic and new
age painting.
A current series of paintings (above) is centred around the contemptible
plastic lucre of the "EC" symbol. The traditional medium
of painting pays tribute to "electronic cash". In these
images, cultural codes are melted into signs, omaments, and fields
of colour with their own, subversive charm The aesthetisation of logos,
brand-names and products is paroclied.
At present, the artists are working on a new series of paintings,
playing with signs that signify their names. Here they create a two-fold
iron :which can be seen as a further developrent of the EC series.
While the art world might often try to conceal its own mechanisms
of "branding", every artist wants his/her style (or lack
of) to be recognised as a type of brand or trade-mark. These new paintings
resemble fragments of surfaces which have been often graffitied over
and cleaned. In them, the artists establish their territories which
always overlap.
Text adapted from an original essay by Viktor Kirchmeier (translated
by David Riff)
Nina
Roemer, 1978 born as Nina Tangian in Moscow, Russia, and Torsten Roemer,
1968 born in Aachen, Germany, both studied and graduated at the Art
Academy Duesseldorf. They are both Masterstudents of Prof. A.R. Penck.
Since 1998, they have been working together as an artist couple in
all their art works, movies and projects. They have been living and
working in Berlin since 2000. They are represented by the gallery
Michael Schultz, Berlin.
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