Fritz Bornstück Germany, b. 1982

Fritz Bornstück was born in 1982 in Weilburg an der Lahn, Germany, and lives and works in Berlin. His academic formation was unusually broad: he began studying mathematics and philosophy at the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz in 2002, before turning fully to the visual arts. In 2003 he enrolled at the Akademie für Bildende Künste Mainz, studying painting under Professor Friedemann Hahn. Two years later, in 2005, he transferred to the Universität der Künste Berlin (UdK), where he studied with Professor Leiko Ikemura and subsequently with Björn Dahlem, Felix Schramm, and Tillmann Küntzel. In 2009 he completed his studies as a Meisterschüler under Thomas Zipp, one of the most conceptually rigorous painters of his generation. From 2010 to 2012, Bornstück undertook postgraduate studies at De Ateliers in Amsterdam, one of Europe's most selective artist residency programs.

Bornstück's paintings are built from the residue of popular culture and private life: bottles, cables, matches, fruit, lightbulbs, and other overlooked objects assembled into dense, figurative compositions that hover between still life and cultural archaeology. He describes his method as "cultural recycling," pulling materials from film noir, found footage, his immediate surroundings, and his own ongoing collection of discarded things. The resulting works are neither purely nostalgic nor straightforwardly critical. Instead, they stage a formal conversation between objects, one in which anachronistic symbols of status and pleasure are translated into paint rather than presented as ready-mades. The surface energy of works such as united 4 ever (2014, oil, rabbit glue, and pigment on tailored canvas) reflects a painterly intelligence that is both instinctive and structurally deliberate.

Bornstück's work is held in the collection of the Arken Museum of Modern Art, Denmark, a significant institutional acquisition that affirms the sustained critical interest in his practice. His work has been exhibited at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin and at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, where he participated in the group exhibition Picasso in Parijs in 2011. In 2012 he was nominated for the Koninklijke Prijs voor Vrije Schilderkunst at the Royal Palace in Amsterdam, one of the Netherlands' most prestigious painting awards.

Bornstück's exhibition history spans Europe and beyond. Group exhibitions have taken him to the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (2011); Haus Bethanien, Berlin (2014); Kunstverein Familie Montez, Frankfurt am Main; KH7 Artspace, Aarhus, Denmark; Galleria Opere Scelte, Turin; and Galerie Maïa Muller, Paris, among others. His solo exhibition Buschfunk at 68projects in Berlin drew on the same accumulative logic that defines his studio practice, staging a world of half-familiar places and objects rendered with painterly directness.

Fritz Bornstück is represented by KORNFELD Galerie Berlin. The gallery has presented his work across both group and solo formats, including the group exhibition Berlin Calling. Works and Paper and the solo presentation Buschfunk at 68projects by KORNFELD. This ongoing collaboration places Bornstück within a program that champions rigorous, internationally engaged painting practices.

Bornstück's work continues to evolve within a framework that is as philosophically curious as it is visually immediate, rooted in the conviction that painting remains one of the most direct ways to examine what a culture keeps, discards, and quietly forgets.