Installation view, Tobias Spichtig: GOOD OK GREAT FANTASTIC PERFECT GRAND THANK YOU, September 9, 2021 - January 9, 2022, Swiss Institute, New York.
Tobias Spichtig
In his paintings, sculptures, and installations, Tobias Spichtig works with objects and materials from fashion, art and music, as well as relics of everyday life. Based on a discourse on images, their perception and meaning, the concerns of his work lie between excess and absence, his most intimate surroundings and media and information overflow. The shell becomes essence, attitude becomes form. The existentialist gesture is readjusted in the digital age.
“...when clothes lie around, they sometimes look like people sleeping on the floor in random places. So I started to fix them in resin and they looked like ghosts. But they still had material presence and the looks of people.”
“The 'sunglasses' are sunglasses on deep shades of colour. They are paintings of Sunglasses. They depict models that I like photographed in the dark with a flash, printed, and partly painted again with a mostly monochrome background. The sunglasses almost look like they are gazing at something. They're like objects as portratis. I kind of wish to be an object all the time - maybe that's why I like them.”
“The abstract paintings are somewhere between ornaments, writing, and perspective collapse. They look like something, but you can't really tell what, exactly. And I guess that's what abstract painting is.”
Installation view, Tobias Spichtig: GOOD OK GREAT FANTASTIC PERFECT GRAND THANK YOU, September 9, 2021 - January 9, 2022, Swiss Institute, New York.
Installation view, Tobias Spichtig: Pretty Fine, September 2-26, 2020, Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin.
Installation view, Tobias Spichtig: Pretty Fine, September 2-26, 2020, Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin.
Tobias Spichtig (b. 1982, Sempach, Switzerland) lives and works in Berlin. He has had institutional exhibitions and performances at Swiss Institute, New York; Kunst-Werke, Berlin; Spazio Maiocchi, Milan; CAC Synagogue de Delme; Folkwang Museum, Essen; Volksbühne Berlin; Dortmunder Kunstverein; Swiss Institute, New York; Kunsthalle Zürich; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, among others.