Thomas Helbig’s precisely composed,
semi-abstract paintings provoke a feeling of confusion and fascination in the
viewer. The soft, muted geometric shapes and colours that stretch and blur over
the surface of his canvases look slightly adrift, as if in the process of
emerging from a backdrop of uncertainty, rife with possibility.
Robin Waart’s work deals with questions of repetition, collecting, memory and
nostalgia. Often the inner language of a medium, whether book, film, Polaroid
or a cliché, marks the starting point of a project. Like the sculptor who
doesn’t sculpt or the lover with no one to love, Waart makes pictures while
avoiding being a photographer, or produces a book about not-writing. He is
interested in how we all echo the stories and the words of others, and how we
are influenced by myths of individuality and origin(ality) – noticing that what
we start with is always a fragment, that fragments are rem(a)inders, but
beginnings too.
