G2 Schaulager
ALTE EICHEN, NEUE BILDER.
Malte Zenses

SPECIAL EXHIBITION
G2 Schaulager

August 16 – December 8, 2024
Opening: Thursday, August 15, 5 – 8 pm

OPENING HOURS
(only through public tours):
Wed.: 6 – 7 pm / Fri. – Sun.: 3 – 4 pm

The artist Malte Zenses (*1987) is showing ALTE EICHEN, NEUE BILDER., a special exhibition of paintings and sculptures that can be seen for the first time at G2 Schaulager.

Zense’s paintings are treatises on abstraction and figuration. Often the gesture dominates in his work, which seems intuitive but is discursively thought through. Zenses plays with codes of painterly elements and contemporary vocabulary, which he condenses into multi-layered compositions. The result is an independent painterly language, the deciphering of which can produce ambivalent results.
Headlines or newspaper logos frequently appear, contextualizing the works without steering them in a particular direction. The images are often framed by text fragments that are dialog fragments from films. These bring a poetic, literary level to the images. They also open up associations and imaginations of the theatrical and dramatic, thus creating fragmentary narratives.
In some cases, the painterly component penetrates much more into the pictures. The results are powerful, dynamic compositions that oscillate between abstraction and landscape figuration.

Zense’s sculptures are dominated by textiles. Patches are sewn together, creating large, confusing surfaces that form a unity of parts like a collage. These are superimposed on an unknown, concealed content, on a framework that depicts physical forms. The figures remain anonymous, faceless and avoid our gaze. They are often hunched over and seem to be seeking protection from something and trying to conceal their identity. They look like inhabitants of an urban, apocalyptic habitat and it remains unclear whether something still exists beneath the surface or whether they are just relics of something.