Bertold Mathes

The works of Bertold Mathes play around basic themes, basic forms, and basic colours of painting in a simultaneously open and strict attitude. The colourfulness of his pictures and the metabolism of the graphic form reveal how the artist works, as it were, on the grammar of a language in the mode of its discovery and its transcription. The ‘spiritual in art’, of which Kandinsky once spoke, comes to the fore when meaning is coined by the genuine language of art, not in a simplistic or symbolically loaded vocabulary. The astonishing degree of freedom of formal design that is manifest in Mathes’s works over decades also takes the catchphrase of the ‘obsolescence of painting in the digital age’ ad absurdum.
Constitutive for the frame of Mathes’s oeuvre are long-term series and cycles. Ac cordingly, the titles of his works are abstract and give the sequence a numerical order: the individual drawing always has a rank of its own, but at the same time it is part of a continuity of constant variation of pictorial and sensory elements. Mathes shows how painting and drawing can be ‘self-referential’ without ever becoming sterile or repetitive. On the contrary: thanks to the transformations and conversions in the depths of his work, even our visual conventions can be freshly rejuvenated.

SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2019 Ausrichtung, Galerie1214, Berlin
2014–15 SONG ABOUT THE MIDWAY: Werke von 1982 bis 2014, Kienzle Art Foundation, Berlin
2012 Drift, Brandenburgischer Kunstverein, Potsdam
2009 GUTE AUSSICHT, Galerie Kienzle & Gmeiner, Berlin

GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2019 Marabu, Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe
2016 give, T66, Freiburg
2015–16 HOW TO BE UNIQUE, Kienzle Art Foundation and cavuspace, Berlin
2015 be abstract, l’oiseau présente, Ballhaus Ost, Berlin, and Kunstverein, Schwäbisch Hall
2014 Was wir zeigen wollen, Heidelberger Kunstverein, Heidelberg