Fritz Bornstück: NEONGRAU

Fritz Bornstück’s new group of paintings presents an encounter with the dark side of kawaii; a return of the komono—Kondo’s name for the troubling miscellaneous items that drive her clients to despair. We are looking at old hats, defunct television sets, oil barrels, a pair of skis, and, bizarrely, the lower part of a donkey’s jawbone. Things that failed to spark joy, but left their owner with some other, more complex emotion. A piano might instead have recalled a frustrating lack of ability, or tortured hours spent with a cruel instructor in childhood. Or a potted plant you neglected to care for now speaks to a dangerous lack of compassion in human relations more broadly, a conversation you’d prefer not to have. All these things remain in Bornstück’s strange, neon-grey world, stubbornly resisting your attempts to wash them away. In Repeater they’re feebly bridled by two leather belts strapped to no stable structure at all, and in Ein Turm von Unmöglichkeiten [Tower of Impossibilities] we see them stacked at impossible precarity. But in these paintings, rules of gravity are suspended; the tower never collapses. The works are portraits of the parts of life that evade order and the things that refuse to fall neatly on the side of joy or sorrow, present or past.

Kilde: Galerie Mikael Andersen