B-Part Exhibition
Images of Architecture #1
Thomas Ravens
Your New Quarters
The artist Thomas Ravens (* 1964), based in Berlin, continues the pictorial research on the theme of landscape in his new works and now presents these and other of his paintings with speculative architectural scenarios under the title "Your New Quarters" at B-Part Exhibition. His urban landscapes, as expressive as they are surreal and gloomy, thus simultaneously open the new exhibition series Images of Architecture by B-Part Exhibition.
The "New Quarters" in
Ravens' pictures seem partly futuristic and visionary, but these are only in
the sense of a historical echo from a Le Corbusier modernism that has long
since been overrun by a concept such as the "Anthropozene". One
suspects that all of the architecture depicted by Ravens will be destroyed, may
even no longer exist, or may be in a permanently frozen, paradoxical state of
extinction. One can think here of Walter Benjamin's Storm of Progress, that
"catastrophe that incessantly heaps rubble upon rubble" - while the
sky running in the background seems to quote Albrecht Dürer's "dream face",
that so haunting manifestation of unconscious fears.Raven's pictures, mostly - also colourfully vivid - ink drawings, thus pose contemporary questions with great urgency. The fact that new quarters do not stand on neutral ground becomes apparent in his paintings.
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