Down the valley up the hill

2022
solo exhibition, Raum für drastische Maßnamen, Friedrichshain, Berlin

In this exhibition a painterly motif is translated into multimedia Installations. In the painting process, the artist was previously looking for a further development of his oil pastel drawings, which appear at the same time in a framed digital version in a hanging installation.The subsuquent works that arose did not end in a classic canvas situation, but necessarily presented themselves in the gallery space as three-dimensional canvas objects.

Landscape painting once began with the view through the window, from the interior to the exterior, and with it the aesthetics of nature. We objectify our surroundings and make them our subordinate. Instead of absolutizing this individual human experience, Toni Ehrhardt seeks a dialogue with the non-human environment in his works. How can we create a more hierachically horizontal relationship to things that we have long degraded to objects? The highly simplified image of the mountainous landscape quickly contradicts this attempt. Rather it describes an objectivity that prompts the viewer to set the process of subjectivation back in motion from scratch.

Fotos: Sedlar & Wolff