For HOT MESS, Kurt Fritsche and Joshua Gottmans are exhibiting the mixed media piece Untitled, which seeks to elicit an unsettling sense of confrontation between viewer and artwork.
The personification of the raggedy creature is asserted by the piercing stare of its green eye, whereas the creased and ripped fabric is underpinned by a history of pictorial studies and classic techniques. Surreal yet ominous, the viewer encounters an uncanny likeness abstracted by the upholstery of the fabric. The anthropomorphic arrangement creates both a sense of kinship and abjection, with the eye-height placement of the artwork instilling the viewer with a sense of paranoia. The observer is being observed.
Kurt Fritsche and Joshua Gottmanns (b. 1995 and 1990, Germany) work at the conjunction of a variety of mediums and techniques that ultimately result in sculpture, photography and reductionist narrative installations. Their recent exhibitions include spoiler.zone, and Central Station, both in Berlin (2022); boo2, Amsterdam (2022); Oststation, Vienna (2021); Erratum Galerie, Berlin (2020); Weserhalle, Berlin (2020) and Kunstraum Potsdamer Straße, Berlin (2019).
Cap, glass eye
15 x 18 x 27cm