David Borgmann: Festland                
11 January—15 February 2020          

David Borgmann: Festland /Mainland
Illustration and abstraction, surface and space, color and texture—these are the poles between which David Borgmann's paintings explore the relationship between painting mode, motif and image in painting. On the one hand, many pictures appear factually abstracted. On the other hand, the landscape motifs, the muted but nevertheless brightly shining colours and the drama with which the textures, colours and motivic elements meet in their precise placement create a strong and emotionally charged atmosphere. The textures, which result from the material experiment with different tools, emerge in a great richness of razor-sharp detail and thus exert a strong pull on the viewer. Meanwhile, the gaze that repeatedly reaches into the depths of the horizon suggests freedom and expanse.

David Borgmann's paintings seem new due to their idiosyncratic painting technique, and yet in many places the intensive preoccupation with the traditions of landscape depiction up to contemporary painting becomes clear. In the simplification of complicated motifs to dynamic painting gestures and in the two-dimensional abstraction, Asian painting and especially Japanese woodcuts echo. Other pictures, such as the more recent seascapes with clouds, are more reminiscent of the seascapes of Gustave Courbet in their clear spatial construction, which is oriented towards the Renaissance idea of the window view. Other pictures deconstruct the space as the Western pictorial history of the optical gaze prescribes it to a collage-like pictorial effect, thereby touching on various ideas: If the landscape here almost becomes a map that we can wander around with our eyes, the illusion there almost dissolves into a geometric composition and thus ties in with colour field painting. Roots and wings—two attributes that can be aptly attributed to David Borgmann's paintings. If the ambivalent, mysterious pictorial effect takes the viewer for itself, then the pictorial world that David Borgmann persistently explores simultaneously reveals itself in motion and leaves room for curiosity as to where this work will develop further.


David Borgmann [*1983] lives and works in Leipzig and Munich. He studied painting with Karin Kneffel in Bremen and Munich and at the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig. 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. Since 2018 David Borgmann has been teaching as an artistic assistant to Prof. Pia Fries at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. With his works Borgmann is already represented in important private and public collections such as the Hildebrand Collection or the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen.
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