Matthias Bitzer

Matthias Bitzer’s (born in 1975) works emerge in the play between the media of painting, sculpture, and drawing. The core is the engagement with the formal and thematic contrasts of abstract and figurative representation. Taking a new perspective on classical modernism, the artist combines portraits and geometric constructions and often takes recourse to the formal language, stories, and intellectual historical contexts of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His works refer often to historical biographies, somewhat outside history, whose displacements and uniqueness he condenses to form a magically-mystically charged visual cosmos. Interested in the relationship between the invisible and the real, he layers symbolic fragments and formal splittings on top of one another like quotes, and divorces them from their original cultural spatial and temporal context. In this reversal of principles of modernism, at issue for Mathias Bitzer is the existential question of the construction of identity.

Matthias Bitzer was nominated in 2005 for Open Space at Cologne Art Fair. His works have been on view at Karlsruhe’s Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste (2004) and Kunstverein Schwäbisch Hall (2001).