About
The paintings of Andreas Golder shift between figurative forms some naturalistic, others expressive and broadly worked abstract passages. This formal ambivalence is reflected in his subject matter, which is a mix of high and low culture, with sly references to the history of painting alongside visceral smears of paint and loose splashes of colour.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1990, Golder moved, along with his family, from the Soviet Union to Germany. His initial artistic training in Russia, at a school for specially gifted children, was grounded in academic realism, with emphasis on precision and classical representation. He eventually rejected the rigidity of this technique, adopting an approach which, in his own words, occupies an âarea between the realistic and the abstract, the physical and the metaphysical; my paintings are another way of telling a story or a view of the world'.
The starting point for Golder's work is often based in a combination of art history, pop culture and personal narratives. Puns, comic anecdotes and violent gestures converge in paintings that, as curator Christian Gether points out, âare not portraits but rather meta-types, commenting on the general state of culture in society today'. Drama im Pyjama (Drama in Pyjamas, 2007) features a misshapen body, slung casually over a washing line. The decaying, gangrenous flesh of the figure, drawn against a black background, references aspects of Francis Bacon's twisted physiognomies, while the application of the paint oscillates between loose, expressionistic brushwork to more representational depictions of teeth and eyes. An absurd, cartoon-like atmosphere undercuts the morbid portrayal of decomposing flesh.
