Bernd Reichert
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Bernd Reichert STATEMENT My collages are a juxtaposition of elements, images and objects which are incoherent to each other, thereby exercising a decontextualising form of violence on language and image alike. They contain a kind of strangeness, a disturbing element disquieting to the spectator/reader who is confronted with a series of elements taken from one’s everyday life which, being put one next to each other, provoke, suddenly, an incoherent situation, a source of obscurity and vagueness. Often I work in series, because the series helps to identify the pictorial answers coping with visual sensations or to follow a thread of thought put into images. “The aim is to replace the notion of art and the art work by an iconographic redefinition capable to support the thinking” (Duchamp). Or, to use the testimony by Max Ernst: “Collage technique is the systematic exploitation of the coincidental or artificially provoked meeting of two or more essentially incompatible realities on an apparently inappropriate level – and the spark of poetry, which leaps at the approach of these realities.” BIO I was born in 1960 on a rainy day behind the Iron Curtain (East Germany). After studies in Berlin and Munich, I am now living and working in Belgium. Having started and still sometimes practicing as print-maker, I have moved my area of interest to works on paper (collages and artist books) and object boxes as a form of 3D-collages. Language and writing are particularly important in my art. However, it is rarely about the meaning of the text, but more for its symbolic aspect. It is about the unknown, the incomprehensible character of a foreign writing and it is, to paraphrase a poem by Paul Celan, on the “unreadableness of this world”. A myth is created and the viewer is reminded of the impossibility to understand and to know everything. I have exhibited my work over the years a bit throughout the world, with solo exhibitions in Germany, Belgium, the UK and Lithuania. ARTIST CONTACT [click to email] IMAGES
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