Opening Event:
Tuesday, September 4th 2007, 7 p.m.

Exhibition dates:
September 5th – November 2nd 2007
Monday – Friday 9 a.m. – 8 p.m.

Special opening for Open Art:
Friday, September 14th, 6 – 9 p.m.
Saturday/Sunday, September 15th/16th, 12a.m. – 6p.m.

In his paintings and his book objects Oliver Westerbarkey reflects above all the perception and conditions of information and importance.He uses his paintings consciously to break down the illusionistic at its very illusionism.In his book objects he uses the principle of effacement and the visible void to make the system of his templates visible with the aid of his “interventions of the second order”.

Westerbarkey does not use canvas as the basis  but penetrates space with his paintings by overpainting everyday objects with “reflections” of their environment.The separation between the picture and the environment or the object and the environment is therefore reformed.In his latest works television monitors are used as the basis for his pictures that relate to the immediate location of the exhibition.The usual image-generating technique of the television screen is remodeled by the artist with his own “stills” that are taken from the usual random mass of the everyday flood of images.Westerbarkey’s new works also reflect his fascination with relating work to the surroundings and picking out motifs from this.

Another central motif for Oliver Westerbarkey’s artistic conflicts are books and magazines.In selecting his starting material Westerbarkey is concentrating more and more on art books.In that they present reality in a selectively processed way they are interpretations that the artist produces and in which he intervenes initially with overpaintings and later with the cutter.The statements of the publications are expanded with his manifest selection of the second order in which he removes parts of the images from the books according to different rules each time.Objects that he has processed include art catalogs such as the 2002 compendium “Art Now”, which provides an overview of the young art scene and in selecting 137 artists for review is itself operating the strategy of “cutting out” in a different form.

When Westerbarkey finished processing the first volume in the usual way he developed a new procedure for the second volume that takes up the motif of a new edition.In his sessions of “focused reading” Westerbarkey first removes all the artworks depicted in the catalog.All the pages of the second volume  “Art Now Volume 2” modified by him with the cutter are individually photographed and re-bound.The catalog now exists in a second edition which is independent of the publishing house and artistic now in two ways.

Biography

Westerbarkey was born in 1969 in Konstanz.Studied from 1998 to 2002 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich; master scholar of Professor Norbert Prangenberg from 2002 to 2005.Received the Mahag Academy Award in 2003.