munich - Katya Tylevich

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Benjamin Röder Munich throwback and shocking colours: a loose cocktail of sharp irony and woozy nostalgia. The artist has countless record sleeves to his name: collages, made of ‘fragments of record sleeves’. Röder says he began visualizing his neighbourhood through graffiti and, as a house party DJ, he gave those same surroundings a soundtrack. He started out making the artworkfor clubs and labels like Compost Records, Per manent Vacation and Gomma. Simultaneously, he was becoming a regular at clubs and organizing underground parties. His dream, he says, was to become an ‘autarky’ with his friends. ‘Music and the club scene have always accompanied me and my art. You could say they raised me’, says Röder. ‘I worked for years to enter those stories – to enter and add to the narrative of that scene. Eventually, I found that I’d worked on so many record covers that the bigger project had to become working on a club itself.’ So I ask Röder if owning a club is an art project, too, or is it the creation of a subculture to which he himself wants to belong? Röder laughs, ‘I’m too old for that. What I’m really trying to do is create a living room in which the circumstances, the sound and the crowd are always perfect. On rare occasions, when everything is just right, people at the club feel totally free, go to a place more intense than real life, and that’s when they act like professional artists.’ Record Rack, 2009, radiator, isolation tape, spray paint, 400 x 140 cm Im-Westen-nichts-Neues, Benjamin-Roeder 2012, silkscreen / paper, 590 x 840 176 177 Aphrodite, 2012, sculpture. Photo by Julian Baumann
Carlos De los Rios Untitled, 2010, oil on canvas, 200 x 160 cm. Courtesy KunstHalle FRISCH, Halle Am Wasser, Berlin. Photo by Bernd Borchart Carlos De los ríos lives and works in the bright neighbourhood of Haidhausen, near Munich’s second central station, where shops and cafés hum with people at leisure. Well, when in rome… Below ground level, in De los ríos’ basement studio, we clink glasses of Prosecco. We’re celebrating the birthday of De los ríos’ gallerist Stephanie Bender, who joins us as a friend and translator, and that’s where the line between the world above and ours below severs. De los Ríos’ studio is a cool, barebones museum of introspection; a foil to the surface extroversion above ground. Artworks cover the walls entirely, even crawling onto the cement of his small outdoor patio. The complexity of colour in his collage work and paintings contrast the primary bursts of a Munich summer (blue sky, yellow pilsner). In De los Ríos’ canvases – some deceptively cheerful, others wrenching and twisted – one glimpses carcasses, bones, bent figures and vaguely familiar creatures. Originally from Colombia, De los Ríos came to Munich in 1998 to study at the Kunstakademie and immerse himself in a culture of painting that he couldn’t find in Bogotá. Over German pastries, De los Ríos echoes something we’ve heard several times in Munich: ‘There’s really no bad neighbourhood in this city.’ De los Ríos tells me he doesn’t need one – not for excitement or thrill, not for inspiration, as many artists claim. He’s had enough ‘excitement’ in what he calls the first part of his life. ‘Bogotá is full of violence, surreal and extraordinary situations. In that way, it’s very “alive” and also very distracting. When I came to Munich, I was confronted with a very different reality. It’s safe here; it’s also quiet. This isn’t a city for late nights. I could concentrate, and all of that influenced not only the way I live, but the way I work.’ De los Ríos says he noticed an initial ‘placation’ in his paintings, when he first moved to Munich. It was a distinct departure from the pathology he saw creeping into his thoughts and works, while living in Bogotá. The last 15 years have seen a sort of reconciliation in his work, in which contrast between past and present, universal and individual, has faded, and a more seamless representation of a thing and its inverse has immerged. Now, rather than contrast, De los Ríos’ work is weighed more by confrontation. He tells me he’s become more secure in himself as an artist recently, even in acknowledging that being an art ist will always entail some feeling of insecurity. Coming from a background in drawing, though, De los Ríos says he values a certain loss of control. It can benefit the work. He wants to feel a ‘looseness and spontaneity’ in his paintings, a medium which can be laborious and overplanned. I ask De los Ríos if geography plays a role in his work – the point on the map where he is now, or the point on the map where he came from. He tells me that his mother was a professional cartographer; before computers, she drew maps by hand: that was his first exposure to art, even if it wasn’t art as he came to know it. ‘But my art doesn’t deal with a regional subject, and it isn’t “Colombian”’, De los Ríos tells me. ‘I look at some of the work being done there now and I’ll see, maybe, an installation on the subject of cocaine. That’s a problem in Colombia, it’s very regional. But it’s not something I want to talk about in my work, directly. I want my work to be universal. I want it to address the idea of power, for example, or the lack of power – something that resonates for people in any part of the world.’ Bender comments that people are often drawn to De los Ríos’ works at shows because of the ‘optimism’ of his colours, then are startled by the grotesqueness they might encounter on a closer look. De los Ríos describes his work as a meeting of ‘brutality, aggression, but also naivety’. For instance, his collage series, 32 Me moiren des Geflügel Exodus [translates rough ly as 32 Memoirs of the Poultry Exodus], which he completed in 2010, is a collection of 32 distressed figures, each a dim reminiscence of a bird. He began this work during an avian flu outbreak in Germany, when ‘birds’ were the unlikely Hitchcockian topic of frontpage news. Though grounded in a specific time and situation, the project comes from a bigger, quite timeless, question. ‘I imagined myself as an old man, with young kids asking me, “What does a bird look like?”’ says De los Ríos. ‘I imagined a time when people no longer had any understanding of this animal, and relied on the memories of old men to visualize it. This piece isn’t about avian flu, it’s about those memories.’ The decision to make collages instead of paintings was as much technical as conceptual: memories, like scraps, can never reassemble to look exactly like the source they came from. This is what De los Ríos means when he talks about working with a kind of versatility and speaking an artistic dialect that is not tethered to a place or time. ‘I’m not driven to work because of the art market or the immediate feedback I get. I am driven to work because I want my art to have a spot in the long run. I want one of my paintings to be considered good and relevant 20 years from now, 50 years from now, as part of art history. I also know that a painter needs time to become a good painter.’ And how do you know when you’re good? ‘I don’t,’ says De los Ríos. ‘I know that the cake is small but everybody wants a piece. Maybe the heavier question is: when are you even allowed to say that you’re a painter? Is it when you’ve sold your first picture or when the first article comes out about your work? Is it because you were born knowing you wanted to do this? It’s a fight you can’t win,’ De los Ríos laughs. ‘I have all my idols of art history stacked up against me. I know where they’re situated, but I don’t know my relation to them. My own art scene, or context, is too close to me for me to see it clearly.’ 178 179 There’s really no bad neighbourhood in this city Munich
Page 1 and 2: Photography Alexei Tylevich VI Dest
Page 3 and 4: Munich An artist in Munich is neces
Page 5 and 6: Munich in 2005, and reopened its do
Page 7: Benjamin Röder CLUB TROPICANA less
Page 11 and 12: Mirko Borsche Unplugged - Design Wo
Page 13 and 14: Maximilian Geuter Wonder Wheel, 200
Page 15 and 16: Tom Schmelzer Responsibility-to-pro
Page 17 and 18: Tom Schmelzer Maybe Next Time or wh
Page 19 and 20: Sonja Herpich From the series Habit
Page 21: Tom Ising Design for Fussball Wunde

munich - Katya Tylevich

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