Heavy Light

2023

Soloshow, RaumLinksRechts, Hamburg                           

In HEAVY LIGHT, Toni Ehrhardt lifts the phenomenon of light in various manifestations to a formal subject.
In doing so, he follows the trail of partly consciously set, partly affectively appearing light sources from past works, such as burning flying objects borrowed from Dragonball Z or the constantly baby-blue sky in his oil pastels. In the material confrontation, the determined human view of temporality and mass also comes into focus.
For something as seemingly formless as light, the artist imagines materialities and channels them through a pop-cultural filter.

„An apple, a pear, a potato: small extra-terrestrial lights encapsulated in the mineral substance of our planet. It is precisely this light that animals search for when they eat the bodies of others (whether they eat other animals or plants); every intake of food is nothing more than a secret, invisible trade in extra-terrestrial light that flows through these movements from body to body, from species to species and from kingdom to kingdom.“

Emanuele Coccia, Interview with Nicolas Truong in Le Monde,5. August 2020

photos: JiyeLee