Wim Bosch, Marten Winters

Spellbound

12 March to 7 May 2006

The two Dutch artists Wim Bosch and Marten Winters find their images in cinema films, Internet, television, video clips, advertising catalogues, brochures or computer games. Like found objects, they take up individual elements or sequences from the media flood of images and add them collage-like to new contexts in films or digitalized photo prints - to new perspectives and references in which the colorful, beautiful and fast images can suddenly appear quite trivial and empty.

Wim Bosch (born 1960) and Marten Winters (1969) ... see themselves as a kind of picture collectors, who draw on the large stock of media, shifting the context of the pictures and the viewing perspectives, thus opening up their own visual cosmos with a new view of things. This provokes the viewer to think and reflect on his own reality - and through the path of artificial change presents a society as grey and speechless, which, in the glow of the rapid images, imagines itself to be extremely communicative and lively.

Winters finds his images on the Internet and in B-movies, his attention is focused on the relationships between people on all communicative levels, but especially on the forms of non-verbal communication, body language. In the exhibition "Spellbound" (German: Wie gebannt) he presents a series of "frozen" scenes from pornographic films: Still images, beyond exhibitionist action and pornographic action.

Wim Bosch uses advertising material, Internet photos, and recently also his own photographs from his immediate surroundings for his technically impressive, extremely narrative photo prints. His interior collages from the household and living area, which seem to be finely painted, are particularly haunting and profound.

In his films, Marten Winters is concerned with people in rooms. "He shows them in sultry and unpleasant situations. The physical interaction becomes a psychological one. The way he depicts people in intimate, embarrassing and often clichéd private situations could be described as 'social porn'. Winters also shows what no one really wants to see - such as dying. In the series of his short films "Interlude" he plays with cinematographic conventions. Humour, tragedy and melancholy alternate. Because of their clichéd nature, the images evoke a certain expectation, which is, however, always confused, ironicized or not fulfilled.

Funded by the city of Neuenhaus and the state of Lower Saxony.