Veronika Dobers
About my work
Gallery HIRAWATA 2009
In my works I want to create an atmosphere which gives the viewer the possibility of self-reflection. He is invited to take part in the interpretation with his own background of life experiences. The chance to identify motives as house, man, boat or flower makes it easy for him to enter the scenery. However this is an abstract world. The objects are not connected to each other in a realistic way or do not signify if they are parts of reality or imagination.
I am interested in intuitive and emotional forms. The heaps, bundles, drops and other objects appear in my work since a long time. They can be interpreted as real things and as visualized thoughts. In Japan I found new shapes when I saw the rice fields. These figures include different energies from nature and human doing. They are connected with basic activities of mankind: to collect, to sort, to keep. Isolated from their usual environment and translated into abstract images they become monumental characters of somewhat concentrated, accumulated, mantled. The heap represents a dialectic principle. Things, thoughts, memories, emotions can be heaped or grow on their own. They might become a big obstacle which blocks the view. But if one takes the trouble to climb it, the contrary is the case - the horizon expends. All these objects are not meant to be symbols. Their influence depends from the whole scenery and differs from case to case.
We are used to view the things in the way we know them. Possibly the heaps and bundles are simply vehicles to interrupt this view to help the brain finding other paths.
Beside drawings and prints I work in a technique which is rare in contemporary art. The motives are painted reverse on the backside of an acrylic glass plate.
The acrylic glass is at once picture background and foreground layer. To the viewer it is both a window into the world of the picture and a partition wall removing the events of the picture. A tension between proximity and unattainability is created which is also subject matter in several of my works: the conflict between Utopia and Nostalgia, Homesickness and Wanderlust, Far and Near, Here and There, Stay and Go. I am interested in the point between, where the emotions of both sides meet or conflict with each other. The inability to decide between two things or the point of decision.
