Kudlek @Art Antwerp 2023

Kiefer is an artist who has mastered figurative imagery. This gives him the opportunity to create a world – filled with intimate and peculiar scenes – in which a symbiosis of reality and imaginary emerges from his unique point of view. Written personal reflections or page thumbnails are drawn on the inside of old book covers, lending his work a certain tactility while revealing some of the deeper content hidden in each drawing.
In his work, Kiefer deals with his individual memories, in particular his own distrust of the accuracy of these memories. This very personal aspect is combined with sociological, political and ecological issues that are presented symbolically and metaphorically.
The sense of dependency triggered by the looming depletion of natural resources and global warming is as present in this series as in previous works, where metaphors of vaults inspired by the global seed bank in Spitsbergen, monumental birds, disproportionate bees and fragile sticks are the superelevated dams represented Kiefer’s fears about our current ecological situation.
White cloths are omnipresent in many of the works in the current series. They create a peculiar feeling as they are in an abstract natural setting, draped in the wind or supported by fragile poles. These drawings are based on photographs of glaciers in the French Alps covered with large sheets of white to prevent them from melting away. In his own way, Kiefer visualizes a sense of protection and preservation while criticizing the human attempts to fight nature and global warming are too little and too late.
As a visual architect, Kiefer guides the viewer through a web of implicit socio-critical and global geopolitical details that slowly unfold as one contemplates the exquisite details visible in each work.

Dragutin Banic (*1979) lives and works in Cologne. He studied at the
HBK Braunschweig from 2006 to 2012 and graduated as a master student
of Prof. Walter Dahn.
Dragutin’s painting is playful, poetic and deceptive. Like a flaneur
walking with his head down and his eyes open, his paintings invite
us to take a path through alleys and backyards where one never had
the courage to walked through before. Leftover bricks, open bins,
stubbing cigarettes or a glowing sign pointing to the back entrance
of a cinema. Abstract settings meet allegorical conditions that
point to something else.
Each of his works, large or small, looks quickly painted, even
sloppy in execution. Painted with rabbit glue, pigment, oil pastel
or egg tempera, areas of color appear impulsively composed and
figurative elements are displayed as hasty actors in a kind of
backyard comedy. And yet, it is quite different. Dragutin Banic
takes his time. The biggest part of his practice is to look. The
painting follows the mature gesture of an artist who is not afraid
to take the time to really have a look.

Simon Schubert was born in 1976 in Cologne, Germany.
The artist skilfully plays with style-defining features of architecture and spatial language, which he condenses into an artificial genre. Although Simon Schubert sometimes lines entire rooms with paper, in which sculptural, mysterious feather creatures indulge in supposedly cultic actions and faceless children lose themselves in enigmatic games, the parallel world, which in its surreality is reminiscent of cinematic scenes by David Lynch, remains only partially accessible. Spellbound, the visitor enters the fascinating architecture, which, however, always sets new barriers for him on the way inside, as with each additional viewing further paths open up visually, but remain physically closed. Bit by bit, the artist lures the recipient into a world that at a certain point begins to retreat from space into the surface, until the path can finally be completed as a mental act of individual imagination.