Gert & Uwe Tobias: To bid the dog goodbye, Overbeck-Gesellschaft
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Gert & Uwe Tobias
To bid the dog goodbyeFebruary 17 – May 19, 2024
Overbeck-Gesellschaft, Lubeck, DEThe two brothers, Gert and Uwe Tobias (*1973 in Brașov, Romania, now living in Cologne), have been working collaboratively since the end of their studies, creating drawings, ceramics, woodcuts, and paintings. Their work explores ways to reinterpret traditional themes and mediums into a contemporary visual language. For instance, they have previously incorporated patterns from their mother’s old embroidery books, transforming them into new visual contexts.
Folk art serves as a toolbox for the brothers—a collective reservoir of motifs and forms they adapt freely to their personal needs. The artist duo gained prominence with large-format woodcuts, a medium traditionally associated with smaller-scale works from the Middle Ages and Renaissance. By giving it a new, larger presence, they opened it to different perspectives. Their imagery often bears the hallmarks of the grotesque: figures, hybrid creatures, floral compositions, and amorphous shapes that appear stretched, compressed, and emerge from multilayered veils of color. Over time, their work has developed a cosmos of folkloric characters, providing a home for dreamlike visions.
In their exhibition at the Overbeck Society, Gert and Uwe Tobias are presenting paintings in a broader context for the first time, predominantly works created during the COVID-19 pandemic. To Bid the Dog Goodbye evokes a sense of farewell. The title reflects an intense artistic engagement with the past and the transient, themes deeply tied to the losses of the pandemic era: the loss of freedoms, loved ones, and, in the evolving discourse, often the loss of humanity itself.
The brothers contextualize this thematic interplay by revisiting and reinterpreting classical subjects such as vanitas motifs, memento mori, and votive imagery, particularly in their large-scale still-life works, closely linked to celestial depictions and danse macabre. The duality of life’s longing for eternity and its inescapable impermanence is a central theme.
Art, in their view, is not about entertainment but enlightenment. Gert and Uwe Tobias offer interpretive frameworks in their works, laden with contemporary symbols that invite the viewer to delve into and decipher their imagery. Traditional motifs, such as skulls and hourglasses, are reimagined with a distinct vocabulary of forms.
The paintings, especially the still lifes, are characterized by a floral morbidity and a grotesque mask-like quality. Suspended in a state of in-betweenness, the objects take on a sacred aura. The spiritual—acting as the hinge between life and death—emerges as a reflection of life itself.
Photos: Fred Dott
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Installation views
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