Back to Painting, a solo show by Tilman Hornig ran from January 23 to March 12, 2016, at Dresden’s Galerie Gebr. Lehmann, displays two different bodies of work by the artist, who last month curated online group show Body Holes with Paul Barsch for online platform New Scenario.
The works in the gallery face each other, reverse glass paintings depicting motifs of wild roses on the right-hand side of the space, and hand-engraved, high-end WLAN routers that are mounted onto mirrors via magnets and incorporate phrases and words like “people are living in underground, in little individual ‘cells’, without having any direct contact with each other” on the left.
For a long period of time Hornig has been painting what he terms “reverse glass paintings” (and groups under the title ‘The Newromanzer’ —a fitting follow up from the phrase New Scenario) upon which he paints dried flowers taken from what one can assume are zoomed in scenes of wild suburbia. In fact, the way the artist has installed these panels, inserted into the backs of old windows that act like frames, evokes the kind of nostalgia that seems deeply rooted in the image and the idea of long streets of semi detached houses and semi detached doors.
The show’s accompanying press release is a short text written by the artist emphatically using the first person to describe what and why these works exist. Hornig extends the sentiment by mentioning to aqnb that the motif of a wild rose painted on a neon shimmering background “functions like a modern answer to our romantic need”.
On the other side of the wall are the group of inscribed routers ‘TXT on Devices’ (2015) with their words described by Hornig as ‘self-written’ and used by the artist to carry his messages, albeit here, on the shiny and reflective surface. One reads:
“We are a proven supplier to service providers across the globe, able to integrate the solutions in a minimum of time in order to avoid the six–gestures-habitats. But when the machine stops, nothing will happen.”**
