Du bist zu high, ich bin zu down - Carsten Fock
Images of the Exhibition
Description
“I am tired” is the name of a song by Rio Reiser, from which Carsten Fock’s current exhibition takes its title. Although the song is from another era, it aptly captures a prevailing sentiment of our own: deep exhaustion. As a response to present-day realities, this exhaustion is spreading. Just as we begin to process the aftermath of the pandemic, we find ourselves facing new crises: climate catastrophe, social fragmentation, political polarization, the rise of the far right. Conflicts escalate into wars, reaching Europe. These issues weigh on us like stones on the chest. We are tired of catastrophe—and in that sense, strangely in vogue. Anyone not exhausted now must either be indifferent or hasn't yet done enough? Distorted realities continue to preach self-optimization to the beat of "higher-faster-further." The highs of others make one’s own fatigue seem all the more profound.
These days, Carsten Fock travels a lot. For a few weeks, he returns to Vejby in Denmark. There, on the Kattegat coast, the rhythm of the sea, steep cliffs, light, and horizon find their way into powerful chalk drawings—night landscapes where darkness and twilight meet. A short time later, on a secluded farm near Düsseldorf, Fock is surrounded by flatlands. Little distracts from the sky, whose dramatic cloud formations inspire large-scale paintings. The color palettes in these works evoke the backgrounds of paintings by Lucas Cranach or Albrecht Dürer. At the beginning of the year, Fock spends a month in Kathmandu and undertakes a multi-day trek through the Langtang National Park. High in the Himalayas, a new perspective opens—on a foreign culture, landscape, and world. Mountains, always mountains—even in Vienna and Salzburg.
Back in Bamberg, Fock is met not with the observing distance of the traveler, but with the immediacy of a society he cannot escape. The paintings created here still hint at landscapes, but stripped of any romanticism. Fock does not illustrate comfort or contentment. He draws the viewer into the inescapability of the present moment, right into the uncertainty of our times. The color gradients are precisely composed and emit a kind of almost cheerful restlessness, always overshadowed by a sense of looming turbulence. There is an ominous presence hovering over these works—more felt than seen.
Whereas Fock previously worked in direct, tactile contact with his materials—manipulating paint, canvas, and paper with his hands—the immediacy of the current moment calls for distance. He begins with lacquer marker: quick, black drawings laid down as a first layer on the canvas, reminiscent of earlier works, later overpainted with brushwork. The exhibition features twelve new small-format paintings whose luminous, explosive color spaces draw viewers in as powerfully as his larger canvases. They invite us to step inside: into expansiveness, into light, and into the possibility of new hope.
Eva-Maria Braun
