Tobias Dostal

About

He uses sometimes anachronistic seeming filmic devices that he himself reconstructed or manipulated to whisk away the audience to a (mental) cinema of a special kind. Simple animated firms, drawn cartoons and documentary short films, but also the light-effect of the projectors and the film strips develop a special cinematic atmosphere that dares a flirt with nostalgia. Vaudeville theater and variety shows are a familiar world for the artist, who has been a magician since age thirteen, in the meantime making appearances as a magician at festivals around the world. These settings are the model for staging his film works. His sources of inspiration include his teacher Christoph Schlingensief. In addition, Dostal refers to the early beginnings of the cinema and the >expanded cinema< of the 1960s and 1970s. In his art, he combines drawing, film, and installation in a unique way.

His latest works include illuminated drawings on acrylic glass that are moved by the changing lighting of LEDs, and, although they are usually only two superimposed drawings, generate brief, strange filmic impression. The solo exhibition in September will take over the entire new gallery space. A narrowing perspective into the already corridor-like building leads to an optical extension of the space. Shelves places along the side walls, which also narrow, with increasingly smaller glasses generate the impression of a virtually never-ending tunnel.

The technique of graphic drawing, which Dostal normally uses on acrylic glass, is here transferred to each individual glass and illuminated from below with a LED, allowing the hand engraving of the artist to appear on each individual glass. This group of more than 200 unique works by the artist results not only in a genuine potpourri of miniature artworks, but also an overall installation that appears to be a crystal tunnel. The tunnel becomes a work that very typical of Dostal: surprising and magical.