Fritz Bornstück — Buschfunk

Expeditions into Trash Romance

By Larissa Kikol

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 heavy objects, the technical legacies from past decades. Like a whispering bag from the 1920s, musical instruments, fire extinguishers, drawers full of stuff, a vendor’s tray from the cinema, or a Converse Chuck shoe. Ambitiously piled high, romantically dropped down, or burning warmly 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 locations and relocated onto a fictitious map of the world.

Bornstück paints compositions from an anachronistic consumer world, antique symbols of status and cultural pleasure, which he does not present conceptually as ready-mades but translates into figurative painting. This evokes associations with a “dirty” Leipzig School or wild Impressionism. In keeping with the pictorial motif, a patina also seems to have settled over the painting. At close range, painterly details dissolve into abstraction. Paint is not applied thinly, but impasto—pressed on, scraped off, and overpainted. Gestures and roughness only become visible when facing the canvas directly. A more chaotic brushstroke appears in small strokes, without disturbing the figurative premise of the image as a whole.

The paintings are all interconnected without belonging to clearly defined series. Fritz Bornstück paints a world that continues to expand. The individual works form a loose network, becoming a landscape in a state of quiet expansion. While the instruments fall silent, one hears the rustling of birds and mice. Painting functions as an expedition—without drums, but in the spirit of a trash romanticism tinged with gentle melancholy.

“This expedition can begin in Berlin-Neukölln, get lost in the most remote places, lead into steppes and jungles, or wherever associations may take you—to a ‘wasteland’. With the gaze, subjective impressions wander through pictorially condensed scenes of everyday scrap, nature, and consumer and late-night goods. A personal film unfolds before the inner eye and then leads back to the here and now, and to the surface of the pictures and their painted-ness: colour, surface, traces,” Fritz Bornstück describes his expedition painting.

Roughly speaking, the places in his paintings fall into three categories: dense, garden-like settings; vast nocturnal backdrops; and intermediate spaces—interiors lit by light bulbs, walls, and niches overgrown by nature. In a nocturnal wasteland, a cinema bench for two is set up. It is empty. In front of it, objects blaze in red-yellow-violet-green flames. An oriole is present—an omniscient inhabitant who surely witnessed what was here, who was here, and who disappeared from the picture again. But it remains silent, staring into the fire, soon departing into the next painting.

Smoke often rises—sometimes from a sousaphone. Fire extinguishers stand ready, but they will do nothing. Bornstück’s ceramic objects, such as the fire extinguisher, cigarette butts, or ghetto blaster, function like homages. They deny their former use and instead act as triggers of memory—of youth cultures, sounds, smells, emotionally charged moments, and tactile experiences.

The absence of people in Fritz Bornstück’s worlds is soothing. Were they present, they would reach for the objects again, attempt to intervene, and the calm would be lost. Whether they are simply elsewhere, or whether these are places of an “aftermath”—after people are gone—remains open.

Fritz Bornstück (born 1982 in Weilburg/Lahn) lives and works in Berlin and Neuhardenberg. After studying mathematics in Mainz, he switched to fine arts, studying first in Mainz with Friedemann Hahn and later at the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK) with Leiko Ikemura, Björn Dahlem, Felix Schramm, and Tillmann Küntzel. In 2009, he completed his studies as a master student of Thomas Zipp and subsequently received the prestigious residency scholarship at De Ateliers in Amsterdam. His works have been exhibited internationally, including in Copenhagen, Paris, Zurich, Stockholm, Munich, Frankfurt, and Berlin, and are held in collections such as the Arken Museum in Copenhagen and numerous private collections.