Beck & Eggeling International Fine Art is pleased to present on this years Art Düsseldorf a various presentation with works of painting, photography, sculpture and video art by well-known contemporary artists of the gallery. With works by Aljoscha, Bertozzi & Casoni, Tamara K.E., Heribert C. Ottersbach, Fabrizio Plessi, Katharina Schilling, Stefan à Wengen, Thomas Wrede.

Ukrainian Russian artist Aljoscha creates on the basis of ideas of bioism, biofuturism and bioethical abolitionism, sculptures and installations of polymorphic and fragile aesthetic. With their seemingly organic structure and amorphous consistency his sculptures made of acrylic paint, silicone and acrylic glass are reminiscent of the structures of microorganisms such as algae, bacteria and others. Still, they are neither a copy nor an interpretation of natural reality, but they present life forms that do not exist yet. Completely new artificial biological systems.

The sculptural pieces of Bertozzi & Casoni deal with the topic transience as both theme and motive. Their original still-life ceramic sculptures with objects of the consumer world and vanitas symbols reflect with subtle irony the aftermath of modern human consumption. They are metaphors for our wasteful society, mass reproducibility. It's about man and nature. Through technical virtuosity and a richness of ideas of the Italian artist duo the traditional vanitas still life achieves a contemporary expression.

Georgian-born artist Tamara K. E. (master student under Alfonso Hüppi), defines in her new series of works a new interrelation between the traditional media of painting and drawing and the possibilities the technology of the digital age offers. In the series »Revisiting Fear«, which she started in 2014, she starts out with Copic Marker drawings and watercolors that rely on Pop culture for their underlying subject matter. The results are then scanned, digitized, processed, and recycled in lengthy periods until the artist is satisfied that they con-stantly oscillate between positive and negative moods and then are printed out by pigment printing onto slide film. Digital-analog collages of painting and Photoshop.

At the centre of German contemporary painter Heribert C. Ottersbach’s work are questions of the value of art as well as the social role of contemporary artists. In his work the artist, who since 2009 has held a professorship for painting at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig, questions among other things, the relevance of painting and its continuation as a contemporary art genre. With reflecting on condi-tions and possibilities of painting he creates new evaluations and context of thought.

For Fabrizio Plessi, one of the most international renowned pioneers of video art, whose work has been honored with spectacular exhibitions at the major museums around the world, art always means movement. Since the late 1960s the element of water is the central theme of his artistic work. »Water, especially the sea, opens our thoughts.« For Plessi, who first took part in the Venice Biennale in 1970 and in 1987 in the Documenta 8, the flowing natural element is a symbol of temporality and a metaphor for memory. With his unmistakeable signature and through the constant use of the latest technology, Fabrizio Plessi, who even at the age of 78 still shows such inventiveness, facilitates with the medium of video a direct and impressive ex-perience of the power of nature.

In Katharina Schillings paintings familiar objects of every day life, bright dart arrows, fragile vases or fluffy
sponges hover as weightlessly and often in non-hierarchical arrangement in an indeterminate image space. Shadowless and immaculate the objects stand out from the canvasses, whose colour structures and forms tell more of their own independence than of the objects positioned at the centre. The paintings of the artist, who was recently nominated for this years Prize of the Böttcherstraße in Bremen, reflect the speculation about preserving and keeping in the arrangement and oscillation of objectivity and abstraction.

Since the 1990s the contemporary painter Stefan à Wengen who is very much present through exhibitions, most recently in the Kunsthalle Luzern, has been investigating issues around cultural codes in large group of works. At the core of his artistic work are topics like the foreign or the disconcerting, death, memory, melan-choly, life, sexuality, anxiety-pleasure, the ritual and the uncanny. His series »Detected Dictionary« (since 2014) deals with images from the collective memory. His »cabinet of curiosities of the subconscious« is inhabited by cuddly toys, floral still lifes, poisonous mushrooms and animals isolated on a small format of 30 x 25 cm (acrylic on linen, mounted on wood) and reduced to a palette of black and white. Highly symbolic paintings of a new reality pointing, again and again, to the vanitas, the fugacity of all earthly matter.

The works in the series entitled »Real Landscapes« (since 2004) by German photographer Thomas Wrede at first glance appear to be impressive landscape photographs. However, the attempt to locate these landscape sceneries in reality remains without result. And at second glance discrepancies and incongruities of the proportions do become recognizable. By using methods which let appear a pile of stones as a monu-mental mountain or a puddle as a large lake, Wrede creates novel worlds of imagery: worlds that exclusively exist through photography and by photography. His photographic works explore the boundaries between the real and the unreal and ultimately the fine line between truth and fiction. It is exactly this confusing interplay of »appearance« and »reality« which Thomas Wrede uses in his works to successively point out that our image of reality ultimately depends on the perspective of the moment.

The presentation continues in a cabinet with highlights by renowned ZERO-artists and a selection of works of other contemporary artists of the gallery.