David Borgmann: Black Holes, Bright Lights
3 November—21 December 2018
From abstract painterly structures, David Borgmann develops landscape pictures in which rhythm and flatness as well as dramatic and soft light situations create fascinating spatial illusions. In different perspectives and on different formats Borgmann creates picture spaces with immersive widths, open horizons and wall fronts, which can be rock or bark or waterfalls. The landscapes found here appear to be withdrawn from both sides and yet accessible.
The lighting plays a decisive role here, when hatchings and volumes glow mysteriously and contours are emphasized or the light is reflected and reflected back by surfaces. The eyes follow the organisation and drama of light in order to gain access to the landscapes and the situations; access is also gained through the sensations of gaze produced by light and structure, and through associations evoked by the recognition of calm wave formations and chains of hills. And last but not least, it is the haptic visual experience itself that offers the relief-like elaboration of the pictures, and access to the pictorial landscapes whose physicality makes them possible.
The aesthetics of the pictorial spaces oscillate between what has somehow already been seen and graphic computer simulation from video games or cinematic views, when islands, canyons, mythical-looking meadow valleys and ice formations appear on seas. Whether unspoiled natural landscape or fiction, David Borgmann's landscape paintings bind the imagination of the viewer, whose landscape structures they follow. And so it is always structures that can be tapped - structural landscapes and landscape structures that invite the viewer to explore the landscape itself or to trace Borgmann's creative game between concretization and abstraction.
The most surprising moments in these compositions, which at first appear so reduced, are probably the immersive experience of the cosmic skies and the actual openness to association and narration of the various sceneries. Until one turns away and suddenly returns to the gallery space.
David Borgmann, *1983, lives and works in Leipzig. He studied painting with Karin Kneffel in Bremen and Munich and at the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig with Heribert C. Ottersbach. In 2015 he will complete his subsequent master student studies at the HGB. Borgmann has received numerous grants and awards, including the 2017 Nordwestkunst prize, which is awarded every two years by the Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven.