Städtische Galerie Wolfsburg

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Following a series of artistic projects with photography, wall drawings and wall paintings, two monumental ‘wall cuttings’ by the young Berlin artist Maximilian Thiel are now being presented.

Extrapolated from traditional printing techniques such as copper engraving and dry point, the artist has developed these techniques for printing graphics further and now transfers them to the large-scale medium of the wall. In an intensive working process, he has thus created two opulent wall engravings that are juxtaposed in an antagonistic dialogue with the minimalistic floor work by Daniel Buren in the Main Train Station in Wolfsburg. If Albrecht Dürer in the sixteenth century still needed the drawing pencil and needle as tools with whose help, like with a scalpel, he was able to elaborate and reveal every extremely fine and yet so tiny detail of reality, Maximilian Thiel, born in Berlin in 1984, then turns today to mechanical angle grinders, round and flat rasps as well as various grooving and cutting tools. With them, the artist carves and pierces, files and sands into the walls of the waiting area of the main train station. In doing so, Maximilian Thiel does not only make temporal and physical inscriptions in the space. In this process, he also once again exposes – layer by layer – the coloured plaster material once painstakingly applied. This original process of generating images, which in the work of Maximilian Thiel reveals a high level of representation and/or recognisability and plays with various forms of figuration, is thus not aimed primarily at artistically portraying the real or the intrinsic. What interests the artist much more is what is under the surface, the concealed: everything that moves beneath the surface able to be perceived and once again comes to light in old rites, traditional rituals and handed down myths seeks expression and appears again in new forms.

In 2012 the artist took advantage of an opportunity to view and study the murals of Bonampak, one of the most important Mayan places of worship in Chiapas on the border of Guatemala, along with the restorers of UNAM (National Autonomous University of Mexico). Maximilian Thiel’s wall cuttings at the main train station in Wolfsburg have been created and are meant to be seen before the backdrop of the intensive, artistic examination of this traditional language of forms, the fusing of history and present in the key medium of contemporary murals in Mexico and questions regarding personal identity in foreign culture that result from this.

Dates

• 17. July 2014 19.00 cet
  Ausstellungseröffnung

  mit Shuttle-Service:

  Um 17.00 Uhr vom Hauptbahnhof Wolfsburg (Haltestelle zwischen BKK-Gebäude und Phaeno) zum Schloss Wolfsburg und zur Ausstellungseröffnung "Aftermath" mit Holzschnitten von Benjamin Badock

  Um 18.30 Uhr vom Schloss Wolfsburg zum Hauptbahnhof Wolfsburg

  Im Anschluss an die Eröffnung in der Kunst-Station im Hauptbahnhof Wolfsburg laden wir zu Musik und Getränken an den Bahnhofsausgang Mittellandkanal mit Blick auf das Kraftwerk und die Autostadt ein!