Robert Elfgen

Berlin

Robert Elfgen focuses on the relationship between nature, human beings, and society. Biographical experiences and everyday observations serve the artist as the point of departure for his works. When the viewer enters one of his space-related installations, the sculptures, assemblages, collages, and films are linked associatively and transformed into spatial allegories which make it possible to experience a private mythology. Transitional situations, social threshold-rituals, the cycle of nature, and the shifts of aggregate states: material and immaterial transfers provide the motifs for his symbolic, often whimsical visual worlds. The works themselves combine artisanally perfect execution with improvisation. Age-old artistic techniques such as glass engraving, marquetry, metal etchings, and relief printing are juxtaposed with used materials, found objects, chance occurrences, and mechanical bricolages.

Robert Elfgen’s new exhibition entitled development confronts us with „stable disequilibriums.“ With humorous and ironical playfulness, he revolves around the relationship between production and utilization in art, society, and nature. In this field he negotiates questions on artistic production as a transformative concept and artistic authorship as a dynamic process.

Sprüth Magers Berlin

April 27th – June 16th, 2012
Oranienburger Straße 18
10178 Berlin
Germany

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