Peter Bosshart

Secret memories - painting vital plus

11 May to 20 July 2014
Opening on 11 May at 11.30

Introduction Dr. Margitta Brinkmann, art historian, Cologne

Under the title "Geheime Erinnerungen - Malerei vital plus" the Kunstverein Grafschaft Bentheim shows a selection of paintings and videos of the artist from the last 10 years.

In his youth, Bosshart toured the local villages as a puppeteer with self-made figures and his own pieces. The desire to tell tales, perform and tell stories still characterizes his work today.
Stories are usually told very close to everyday events. Extreme close-up views, surprising perspectives or reduction to the cut-out-like alienate the motifs and allow for alternative interpretations. No photorealism, but cartoon-like, sometimes seemingly naive, then again surprisingly sophisticated ciphers on hurriedly thrown backgrounds.
Bosshart's picture stories challenge the viewer's speculative imagination and encourage him to think further. They are "secret memories", according to an aphorism by Kierkegaard, which nevertheless aim to transcend and convey individual experience. In short: to fill the iconographic void of modernity, which no longer knows any obligatory pictorial narratives, with associative thought.
Bosshart is not interested in harmonious compositions, beguiling colour sounds or painterly brilliance. Aesthetics are secondary - what is important to him is to capture an idea, a performance or an anecdote on canvas. Despite the quick, sometimes deliberately and unfinished formulations, his paintings have nothing in common with the neo-expressionist, "wild" power painting of the 80s. The addition "painting vital plus" in the exhibition title ironically distances itself from such turpentine-saturated vitality. At the same time, it reflects the strange business cycles of a métier that has been declared dead with beautiful regularity since the beginning of the last century, only to resurrect all the more spectacularly after years of convalescence. Finally, in the gerontological industry, "Vital plus" is a much-used marketing acronym - the promise of eternal youthfulness and agility. This is the kind of short-circuiting and circular reasoning that Bosshart uses in his art.
Paintings and video works by the Städel graduate can be understood as a meditation on the "condition humaine", as a very personal interpretation of the comic, absurd, banal and tragic nature of human existence. Or, as the "Bild" newspaper titled it on Easter Sunday: "Resurrection! Holidays! Sex!". Death as the "conditio sine qua non" of this triad, mourning and everyday life are also found in his pictures. In an abandoned wheelchair, for example, and in the smile of Nadine E., once snatched from anonymity by the same tabloid, to make a private tragedy public with the image of supposed happiness. Nothing is as it seems: here a rift in the great world theatre opens up - and the puppeteer's play can begin. (Margitta Brinkmann)

Peter Bosshart (*1966) studied at the Frankfurt State University of Fine Arts with Thomas Bayrle, Martin Kippenberger and Andreas Slominski, among others.
He lives and works in Efringen-Kirchen (southern Black Forest).

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue published by modo-Verlag Freiburg.


The exhibition is supported by the city of Neuenhaus and the Ministry of Science and Culture of Lower Saxony

Parallel 25: Ivon Drummen