Bernd Reichert

"I have always been interested in surrealist art and magic realism. The figurative aspect is important there. Coming from printmaking, I started out with using existing imagery, but more and more I have been combining collages with painted elements up to the point where the painting takes full control."

La Belle Machiniste - Acrylic and collage 70 x 70 cm

“I was born behind the Iron Curtain in East Germany. I am now living on the surreal shores of Belgium. I studied printmaking in Germany (Berlin, Magdeburg) and Ireland. After many years of producing limited edition prints in all forms, I stopped for a few years my art production and traveled the world extensively. Now I have moved my area of interest to collages and paintings. I like to see myself as a kind of surrealist artist in the tradition of Leonor Fini, Eileen Agar and the likes.

My collages are a juxtaposition of elements, images, and objects incoherent to each other, thereby exercising a de-contextualizing form of violence on language and image alike. They contain a kind of strangeness, a disturbing element disquieting the spectator/reader who is confronted with a series of elements taken from one's everyday life which, being put one next to each other, provoke, suddenly, an incoherent situation, a source of obscurity and vagueness. Working with text and images, I like to encourage the viewer to oscillate between reading and looking. It is about reusing, recycling and re-contextualizing the over-abundance of images and information we can choose from Time, the various cultural influences of the placed I traveled to and a Babel-like plethora of different languages are recurring aspects of my work.

The artwork is telling stories, influenced by my travels, but also often containing autobiographical elements."

 

Select Solo Exhibitions

Gallery Kaire-Desine, Vilnius (LT), 2005

Gallery Meno, Cultural Centre Jonava (LT) , 2005

Musée de l’Art Spontané, Brussels (BE), 2008

Gallery 89, London (UK), 2010

Kunstwerkstatt, Magdeburg (GE), 2010 and 2013

Gallery ORT, Birmingham (UK), 2012

Cultural Centre, Minden (GE), 2014

L’Apparition - Acrylic and collage 70 x 70 cm
Merz N°2 - Collage 15 x 10 cm
Waiting - Acrylic 70 x 70 cm
Heize Elektrisch! - Collage 30 x 21 cm

This review was published by Circle Foundation for the Arts © CFA Press ∙ Images are courtesy of the artist


 

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