Galleries in Paris

For his first solo exhibition in France, the painter Marlon Wobst chose the suitable title Starter, after an eponymous work showing a runner on the verge of starting. The viewing angle recalls television cameras documenting a race: Its oblique position behind the runner enables to fully capture the tension and concentration of the moment. All around is a mist of shades of grey. The attention is entirely directed towards the runner.

I N TR ODU C T I O N

With Marlon Wobst, the trigger is often completely banal: a commonplace simple object, movement, situation or activity. In Abstraktes Kaufhaus (The abstract department store/The department store of abstract), figures wander between objects that do not belong to an ordinary store: they are sculptures placed in a very luminous, “copper skin” colored environment. Is this the artist’s dream, sarcasm or light delirium depicting a consumer’s universe where artworks could have replaced usual objects of desire from stores? The painting suggests a multitude of meanings and possible interpretations largely conveyed by the matter’s expressivity. Thus, the abstraction evoked in the title lies in the pictorial space as well as in the abstract form of the pieces on show. The language is almost naïve, but above all very efficient. Energy emanates from the dabs and the movements depicted. Here colour and matter superimpositions are not those of hesitation; they give density and a great sensuality to the narration and to the expression itself. The Badegast (Bather) painting is a good example of this. It shows a human figure immerged in azure blue water: only the head, the hands and the toes turned towards the spectator are partially visible. A sensation of pleasure emerges from this scene to such an extent that the fusion between the body and the water with its ripples and play of light takes an almost original dimension. Being in this intense blue is being born or re-born.

S TATE M E N T A N D P OS SI B I LI T I E S

Translating isolated situations, details that gripped him are characteristics of Marlon Wobst’s universe. Figures are often in full action but the entire scene is detached from a precise context: The space is that of a matter where glimmers of superimposed colours vibrate. There, the everyday activities and elements represented slip towards a dreamlike universe – a world where the substance is that of painting. But make no mistake; if painting as a statement and possibility admittedly has a privileged place in Marlon Wobst’s work, this doesn’t necessarily mean that he bids farewell to the real world: Often very raw forays of daily events or of the intimate run alongside the poetic and a good dose of humor.

B ACK GR OU N D

This year, Marlon Wobst (born in 1980 in Wiesbaden, Germany) was awarded the Charlottenborg Fonden institution prize, the “Solo Exhibition 2015” (Denmark) and will thus have a solo show at the Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen in Spring 2016. Despite his young age, the artist has an impressive background with numerous exhibitions in Germany, Denmark and Brazil.

Marlon Wobst studied at the Akademie für Bildende Künste of Mainz and at the Universität der Künste in Berlin. He currently works and lives in Berlin.