THOMAS BAUMGÄRTEL
VERNISSAGE BILLBOARDS EXTENDED
The spring exhibition "Billboards Extended" at EKTRA-Offspace presented selected works by Cologne-based artist Thomas Baumgärtel. Having become internationally renowned as a banana sprayer, Baumgärtel's "Billboards" reflect his beginnings as a pioneer of German urban art. This is because poster art, which is based on tearing down posters and reusing them to create collages and mixed media works, marked the birth of urban art in the early 1950s. Under the name "Affichistes", poster artists Jacques de la Villeglé and Mimmo Rotella became pioneers of the new realism and wrote art history with their works made from scraps of paper.
Thomas Baumgärtel takes this approach a step further by using entire billboards and transforming them into image carriers. With their patina and traces of old posters, they not only convey their own history, but also bear witness to urban and architectural history. On their backs, which Thomas Baumgärtel transforms into picture surfaces, are imprints of the buildings to which they were once attached. These stamp-like relics thus form the basic structure for Baumgärtel's subsequent spray and paint applications, which sometimes take the form of iconic comic figures such as Charlie Brown and Tin-Tin, sometimes poetic views of Cologne and landmarks. The Cologne-based artist spans a stylistic range from street-style stencils to photorealistic paintings. The urban origin and spirit, which is either reflected in the direct reference to the materials and techniques of urban art or expressed in the explicit motifs of urban space, always remains a common thread. Baumgärtel thus opens up a double game with the concept of urbanity.
www.bananensprayer.de
