Roger Wardin – Die Geister über den Wassern
Malerei und Arbeiten auf Papier/Painting and works on paper

12. September – 17. Oktober 2015/September 12 – October 17, 2015

Vernissage/Private View: 11. September 2015 von 19-21 Uhr/September 11, 2015, 19-21

Zur BERLIN ART WEEK: Ausstellungsrundgang mit Roger Wardin am Freitag, dem 18. September 2015 um 18.30 Uhr

On the occasion of the BERLIN ART WEEK an exhibition tour with Roger Wardin takes place on Friday, September 18, 2015 at 18.30

Info

Referring to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s poem „Gesang der Geister über den Wassern“ we display in a one-man-show new paintings and works on paper by Roger Wardin. In this poem Goethe celebrates the ambivalent and mysterious forces, which are the keynote of the presented artworks and inspired through the seascapes surrounding remote islands. Due to their geographical, historical and cultural characteristics these islands have become a topic of research and are an important motif for the artist.

Wardin, born 1971 in Berlin, first studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in the class of Jörg Immendorff then he moved to the Universität der Künste Berlin (Berlin University of the Arts), where he graduated in 2001. Wardin created a unique painterly signature-style, which is characterized by an interaction of oil, acrylic, varnish, spray paint and the experiment with materials of everyday life like plastic, silicon and found objects made of wood, metal etc. Furthermore he makes use of substances like salt (NaCl), saccharin, sand, ash and clay as artistic instruments. Through this interaction and the layering of these different materials his paintings accrue haptic surfaces which sometimes evoke images taken of the surface of the planet Mars or similar locations. Landscapes, architecture and portraits are decomposed through his particular artistic process into abstract parts and paintings like “Goldilocks”.

Beside large-format paintings we present in this installation small-scale paintings and collages, in which Wardin draws lines with yarn. These artworks are combined with found objects like wood or metal, dried plants, replica of plastic bottles, etc. which are carefully arranged by the artist. Thereby he carries on with an idea he first invented in his exhibition 2013 at the Kunstverein Duisburg creating a cosmos of lots of contradictory and additional elements.
The gloomy colours of his paintings, currently often reduced to back-and-white, can be seen as a confession of the research of the rules in the dark and in the insecure depths. This is not a sign of nihilism. It is, as in Goethe’s poem, a glimpse of the interplay of the smooth and the troubled sea.

Biography by request