BERNHARD MARTIN

CHOI&LAGER Cologne is pleased to present a solo exhibition by German artist Bernhard Martin. Hotel 361° (Graceland, Disgracecounty) is the title of a new series of paintings and drawings in Martin’s Diktatur der Hormone, a cycle of works he has been working on over the past three years. Originally planned as paraphrases for the iconography of the Last Supper, they changed-in the course of the work process-into table scenes, as well as hotel and bar scenes that are out of joint, reminiscent of scenes from a movie. Hotel 361° refers to the mood of Lunar Park and Glamorama by Brett Easton Ellis without any direct citation.

The paintings show hotel scenes of a modern traveling and consumerist society (Mindhungry Traveller). They depict episodes at a hotel. It is a portrait of a society that, according to Martin, ‘is suffering from its own established rules and finds no satisfactory answers to the questions of power, love, jealousy, and desire, and chooses to resort to cynicism, double standards and lack of restraint.’ Bernhard Martin does not evaluate or categorise. He is interested in this phenomenon, the inherently absurd, the hilarious, crazy, abnormal, the enigmatic, illogical, the paradoxical and meaningless. This expression of absurdism culminates in one of the images showing a scene in a hotel bar (Warten auf das Andere). Furthermore, Bernhard Martin, in this work, poses the question of ‘whether the absurd is not the realm of the last free thought.’ Sources of inspiration for Martin’s images range from Otto Dix’s famous triptych Metropolis (1927/1928) to the shrill and merciless aspects in Quentin Tarantino’s films.

In recent years, Bernhard Martin has been known for his radical way of sampling, and for the combinatorics of different styles of painting, usually resulting in exuberant visual narratives. Now, he lightly applies pastel tones in a novel way on the raw canvas, bestowing a magical atmosphere onto the images. At first glance, Martin’s works appear beautiful. The subversive subtext of his encrypted pictorial worlds becomes visible only on closer inspection. The paint application is very delicate, so that the images appear strangely remote. This new technique in Bernhard Martin’s work shows his innermost need for change; change and transformation are central themes in the work of this artist; but this also always entails stylistic changes. I am not interested in doing the same all my life when everything is constantly changing around me. It appears rather more relevant to develop a language that can withstand this, and tries to link and combine everything’.

Bernhard Martin is a chronicler of everyday life. A judicious, never spontaneous recourse to, at times, the most infantile objects is typical. ‘The thought of arbitrariness, without actually being arbitrary’ is what he himself calls his program. ‘I paint as others talk’ Martin concludes. ‘I am interested in worlds, islands, cabinets of curiosities, biotopes, colliding opposites, ergo daily life,’ is how Martin describes the intention of his work, which forms a fascinating subsystem to real phenomena. ‘Many pictures are like vortexes, drawing in the viewer’s gaze,’ as Daniel Völzke once remarked in ZEITmagazin (19/2008).