Till Gerhard - Glaube, Hoffnung und Liebe
19 September – 9 November 2007
Galerie Michael Janssen, Berlin

After his solo exhibition in 2006 in the gallery’s showrooms in Cologne, the Galerie Michael Janssen now has the pleasure to present Till Gerhard’s second solo exhibition in Berlin.

Gerhard, born in 1971 in Hamburg, where he now lives and works, among others took part in exhibitions at the Hamburger Kunsthalle (Hamburg) and at Saatchi Gallery (London).

The scenes in Till Gerhard’s paintings might, at rst sight, seem perfectly cosy but at second sight they at the latest cause discomfort. Ostensible unoffending photo templates of young people on festivals in front of moody sunsets are turned through painterly transformation into something sinister and threatening, with deformed faces, dark and threa- tening skies and spookily levitating shining entities.

With loose painterly gestures in lucid neon-colour hues and by means of impalpable shifts and inserting mysterious, in- explicable aspects that seem to be visible on canvas only for a couple of seconds only to disappear the next moment, Gerhard turns the icons of a hippie-contemplativeness from the sixties up to the present time into weirdness. The channelling of such frightening elements in everyday situations -or rather vice versa, the discovery of weirdness in familiar surroundings- does not serve Gerhard as stylistic device for a gothic ctitious movie but documents his doubts on the innocence of the very real times of his childhood, which in retrospection and on photos seems unnaturally safe and sound.

Till Gerhard - Glaube, Hoffnung und Liebe, Installation view, 2007, Galerie Michael Janssen, Berlin