Böhler & Orendt Germany & Romania, b. 1980/81

Matthias Böhler was born in 1981 in Aachen, Germany, and Christian Orendt was born in 1980 in Sighișoara, Romania. Both live and work in Berlin. Böhler studied painting under Professor Michael Munding at the Academy of Fine Arts in Nuremberg, where he completed a Meisterschüler degree, and also studied object sculpture under Professor Manfred Pernice at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. Orendt studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Nuremberg and at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig (HGB), in the Department of Graphic and Book Art. The two artists met at the Academy of Fine Arts in Nuremberg and began their permanent artistic collaboration in 2008, graduating together in 2009.

Since the beginning of their collaboration, Böhler & Orendt have developed a practice rooted in what they call media-hybrid storytelling. Drawing freely on drawing, digital processes, sculpture, model-making, stage design, and performance, they construct layered installative narratives that accumulate over time into an increasingly complex shared cosmos. Their subject is the relationship between the human species and the planet: the ecological, political, and existential consequences of human behaviour, rendered not through didactic critique but through darkly playful, often uncanny imagery. Recurring motifs include hybrid animals, collapsing natural systems, and figures caught between agency and helplessness. Works such as Tierrakete, Hôpital des Abeilles (2015), and the expansive multi-part series The Spirit of the B.U.D. or The Sweet Certainty of Deliverance from the Darkness that Surrounds Us exemplify the duo's ability to move between the intimate and the monumental, the comic and the catastrophic.

Böhler & Orendt have received numerous awards and grants in recognition of their work. In 2011 they received the Bavarian State Sponsorship Award, and in 2016 they were awarded the Triennale Schweinfurt prize, which led to their first major institutional survey exhibition, Epimetheus' Sample Kit, at Kunsthalle Schweinfurt in 2018, accompanied by a monographic catalogue raisonné supported by the THORWART-Jeska Foundation. Their work is held in public and private collections including the Neues Museum Nuremberg, Kunsthalle Göppingen, Kunsthalle Schweinfurt, the Sammlung Birner + Wittmann, and the Leif Djuurhus Collection. Permanent public installations are sited in the park of Wildbad Rothenburg and in the courtyard of the Bavarian State Office for Statistics in Fürth.

Their exhibition history spans institutions across Europe and North America. Solo and major presentations have taken place at the Berlinische Galerie, Berlin (2023), Kunst Haus Wien, Vienna (2023), the Neues Museum, Nuremberg (2024), the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, Charleston, USA (2018), the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Kunst-Werke Berlin, and the Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn. The duo has also participated in the Salzkammergut Kulturregion 2024 programme in Austria and has undertaken public art commissions across Germany. KORNFELD Galerie Berlin presented Böhler & Orendt in the solo exhibition The Wild, the Furless and the Spirit of the B.U.D. at 68projects in 2021, and went on to present their work at Art Cologne in November 2022.