Gert & Uwe Tobias: Enough Room To Swing A Cat

With their self-developed technique, their woodcuts on canvas consists of hundreds of layers of paint coming from small hand carved pieces of wood are placed in a geometric grid structure. Transforming both classical painting and the long tradition of woodcut, Gert & Uwe Tobias play with genres to find new ways of creating space within the surface. In their recent woodcuts on canvas,the main figure is a twisted personage caught in an endless space. This exaggerated imagery draws parallels to the central figures in Francis Bacon’s large-scale triptych Three Studies of Lucian Freudfrom1969. A similar half figurative, half abstract matrix of fantastic and jarringly animistic remnants is the foundation in Gert & Uwe Tobias’ colored woodcut on canvas.

In other works, the strong presence of history is shown through the classical composition of figurative fragments. Especially in a large, horizontal woodcut on canvas, the constructed narrative demands for a more symbolic reading; A hand seems to be moving freely through the image space next to a female personage. Reminiscing Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supperfrom around 1490s where a similar hand, detached from any of the bodies represented, is cutting through the neck of Maria Magdalene. Using a comparable format, Tobias’ monumental canvas in 200 x 300 cm are looking like our new history painting. 

Gert & Uwe Tobias (b.1973, Transylvania) are collaborators and twin brothers. Working as one brain, the left and the right side by side, handcraft is essential to their practice when working in their Bauhaus home-studio in Cologne. Since graduating from the art academy in Braunschweig in 2002, they have been seeking to redefine ways of making art. Enough Room To Swing A Cat is their first solo exhibition at Nils Stærk, at the same premiering in Scandinavia. The exhibition continues a large number of international exhibitions amongst others; Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen, DE; FRAC Auvergne, Clermont-Ferrand, FR ; Gemeentemuseum of contemporary Art, Den Haag, NL; La Conservera, Ceuti/Murcia, ES; Kunstmuseum Bonn, DE; MoMA Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA. Their work can be found in museum collections worldwide such as UCLA, Hammer Museum of Art, Los Angeles, USA; Sammlung Goetz, Munich, Germany; FRAC Auvergne, Clermont Ferrand, France; Kunstmuseum Bonn, Bonn, Germany; MoMA Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA.