Fritz Bornstück Germany, b. 1982

As the year draws to a close, 69salon by KORNFELD invites you to a special dialogue:
In the exhibition “Doppelspiel”, the painter Franziska Klotz and the painter and ceramicist Fritz Bornstück meet for the first time – two Berlin-based artistic personalities who each, in their own way, explore the traces of our present.

Franziska Klotz’s painting is physical, probing, multi-layered. A tactile, exploratory way of painting lets objects, animals and figures emerge from the in-between. Her works speak of perception, memory and the tenderness of the moment.

Fritz Bornstück, in turn, brings the small relics of everyday life to life in his oil paintings and ceramic sculptures – furniture, vessels, fragments of technology – which gain a new presence infused with poetic melancholy and subtle humour.

In their interplay, a double game unfolds between closeness and distance, light and shadow, seriousness and a wink. The exhibition also marks the opening of the first winter salon at 69salon by KORNFELD – with a Christmas tree filled with small works and editions by artists who are friends of the gallery, and a book presentation by Marianne Ludes (“Trio mit Tiger”*).

You think you know them, these places, these compositions of old things, of rubbish, of idyllic vegetation. You don't discover them by strolling, rarely by walking. To get here, you have to roam around, follow an urban explorer's instinct, leave paths, look for hiding places. Children and young people are best at this, but so are homeless people or graffiti sprayers. And then they appear, the traces of the heavy objects, the technical legacies from past decades. Like a whispering bag from the 1920s, musical instruments, fire extinguishers, drawers full of stuff vendor's tray from the cinema or a Converse Chuck shoe. Ambitiously piled high, romantically dropped down or burning warmth in a fireplace. Together they act like fertilizer, through them weeds blossom paradisiacally. After a few moments of contemplation, it finally becomes clear that Fritz Bornstück's pictures do not show real places, they only seem that way at first glance. They are un-places, exposed in hidden places and relocated in a fictitious map of the world. Larissa Kikol

Tom Anholt, Samuel Bassett, Armin Boehm, Fritz Bornstück, Hannah Dougherty, Farshad Farzankia, Robert Fry, Philip Grözinger, Michelle Jezierski, Franziska Klotz, Clemens Krauss, Manfred Peckl, Andrew Salgado, Sebastiaan Schlicher, Tina Schwarz, Joachim Stracke, Kristian Touborg
The exhibition Berlin Calling: Works on Paper, a selection of works with and on paper. In close collaboration with the Berlin artist Philip Grözinger, 16 contemporary artists – invited by Grözinger – will show works that express the diversity and variety of the medium of paper in striking fashion.
This involves drawing, painting and watercolouring, folding, gluing and collaging. Figuration is juxtaposed with abstraction, expression with introspection, plenitude with emptiness, image with text, fleeting sketches with pictorial compositions. Small formats are contrasted with larger works that branch out into room installations. Recourse to the medium’s centuries-old tradition is supplemented by artistic concepts that elicit completely new facets from paper.