TRANSPARENT TREES

CHRISTOPH ROßNER

EXHIBITION DATES:
MAY 9 - JUNE 15, 2024

Romer Young Gallery is pleased to present Transparent Trees, its fifth solo exhibition with German artist Christoph Roßner. Roßner's work is firmly rooted in the ethos of the Leipzig School of painting which is often regarded as breathing “new life into the East German tradition of social realist figure painting with enigmatic narratives and surrealist overtones.” Like the artists of the Leipzig School, Roßner shares a “technical skill, a devotion to figurative art, and a predilection for dry-eyed melancholy subject matter.” A strange surrealism and a discordant palette pervade his spaces. Colors are keyed up, and concerns of formalism overrule the narrative. Paintings appear like a daydream, and “convey a mood, not a message.” Fading in and out of reality, this push and pull allows for the paintings to exist in a unique space all their own.

Transparent Trees presents a series of paintings that invite the viewer to wander through a strange and imaginary park, offering a poetic and whimsical peek into Christoph Roßner’s world. Inspired by comic books, Expressionism, the quirkiness of Surrealism, and a general love of the mundane, Roßner’s paintings “resemble dreams that are receding from consciousness.” By extracting moments from the everyday and combining them with chance and bizarreness, Roßner begins by setting the stage within which things can happen. Trees, grass, flowers and paths painted in faded and thinly painted colors, appear unsettlingly transparent and without weight - the way things might appear in a dream. Things seem like they have emerged out of a comic book, strangely alienated and yet curiously familiar. With the ease of his brushstroke, Roßner creates his theatrical environment, setting the stage to introduce his characters.

“We don't meet people directly in this park - the protagonists of the pictures are the trees, we don't find walkers nor animals in this park.” People, the characters, are absent in these new paintings.  But numerous references appear in the form of various objects, things that seem to fit surprisingly, yet seamlessly into the natural landscape they inhabit. An umbrella floats upside down on a small pond. A blue dandelion grows out of a stack of old compact discs. In a small area of forest, incense sticks are lit and their smoke winds thoughtfully around a trunk. In the painting, Transparent Trees, flutes lie on the ground and lean against a trunk, much like tired walkers after a long journey. Subtle relationships and connections begin to form between the inhabitants of his paintings. Roßner uses our familiarity with these inanimate objects and environments as an opportunity to re-frame and re-introduce as strange, both physically and psychologically.

Ultimately, his images remind us time and again that they are simply a collection of colors on an expanse of canvas, and the illusion of the space and the things depicted are things that can be endlessly questioned. It is not entirely coincidental that there is an old wooden pipe in one of the trees that is strongly reminiscent of Magritte's picture with the inscription "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" - (This is not a pipe).

Christoph Roßner received his BFA at the Bauhaus University in Weimar, 2006 and his MFA at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts in 2011. Recent museum and institutional exhibitions include Oblomow (solo), Leonhardi-Museum, Dresden, DE, Heft eins (with Jakob Flohe), FAK Foerderverein aktuelle Kunst, Münster, Anonyme Zeichner, Kunstraum Bethanien, Berlin. Recent solo and two person exhibitions include, ghost paintings, dst.galerie, Münster, DE, Throwing Shadows (w/ Harry Thring), Westwerk, Hamburg, two artists you should know (with Lucie Freynhagen), Zygote Press, Cleveland. Group exhibitions include, Société, C.Rockefeller Center, Dresden, WIN/WIN Ankäufe der Kulturstiftung des Freistaates Sachsen, Halle 14, Leipzig, ALL STAR CAST, Galerie Baer, Dresden. His work is in the public collections of Kunstfond, Collection of the State of Saxony, Collection of contemporary art of the Federal Republic of Germany, Bonn, Kunstfond, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Deutsche Nationalbibliothek Frankfurt, Sächsische Landes-und Universitätsbibliothek Dresden. 

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(*Lubow, The New Leipzig School, NYT)