OPENING Christof Mascher – Thursday 21 May 18 – 21h

more about Christof Mascher

Christof Mascher’s work represents his artistic approach as well as his own sense of independence and his life as an artist. Influenced by his active experience in the hip-hop and graffiti scene during the 1990s, his painting is associative and collage-like, much like a dub DJ who takes elements of sounds and pieces of music – so-called samples – and reassembles them as a new composition.

Mascher‘s pictures and drawings are pervaded by contradictions and unexpected interruptions – or breaks, in keeping with musical terminology. Finished-painted elements are found alongside the implied and gestural next to the ornamental and abstract beside the representational. Ethereal remnants of landscapes and architecture are still under construction or are already in decline. Nothing seems to make sense in his visual world, and pictorial spaces virtually dissolve, leaving all options open. Mascher‘s visual language follows its own iconography, and he makes equal use of influences from both high and mass culture alike. Scenarios out of adventure games from the late 1980s are just as meaningful as works by Hieronymus Bosch, Pieter Bruegel, Edvard Munch, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner or Phillip Guston. One is also reminded of Per Kirkeby‘s paintings on masonite from the late 1960s. His recurring architectural elements are partly borrowed from old cartoons, Expressionist silent film and East German DEFA films from the 1970s.

Christof Mascher – Born 1979 in Hannover, lives and works in Braunschweig, Germany. Mascher studied at the Hochschule für bildende Künste (HBK), Braunschweig, under Professor Walter Dahn.
Previous solo museum exhibitions include Kunsthalle Emden, Germany, 2011, Galerie der Stadt, Remscheid, Germany, 2008, and Museum of Modern Art, Goslar, Germany, 2008.
Previous solo gallery exhibitions in Berlin at Michaël Janssen, London at Josh Lilley, Amsterdam at Vous Etes Ici, Athens at Vamiali and LA at The Happy Lion.
Selected group shows include Visions, An atmosphere of change at Marta Herford, 2013, It’s a small small world at Family Business, New York, 2012, Burning colours, Hopstreet Gallery, Brussels, 2012, Im Auge des Fuchses, Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Braunschweig, 2012, All in Together Now, at Mai 36, Zurich, 2011, The Forgotten Bar / Galerie im Regierungsviertel, Berlin, 2010, and Re-Reading of the Future, International Triennale of Contemporary Art, National Gallery, Prague, 2008 and featured in the exhibition Black Bile, Red Humour at the Art centre Montabaur alongside Tal R, Matthew Barney and Jonathan Meese.