Veronika Dobers Statement

I am interested in intuitive and emotional forms. The branches, bundles, heaps and other objects appear in my work since a long time. They can be interpreted as real things and as visualized energies. I created these figures intuitively. The branch was the earliest image. The first work in which it appeared is titled “the scientist”. It shows a man standing on a branch which is floating in an indefinable space with another branch covering the man´s eyes.

When I came to Japan I saw the rice fields with various shapes of bundles from rice straw. These objects are made by man and nature. Their shapes are connected with basic ways of human thinking and doing: to collect, to sort, to cover, to keep, to build, to design. The bundle in my work presents bundled energy. In German language there is a saying, that everybody has to carry his own bundle through his life.

In some of my works I use archaic proverbs with a moral content which were used to educate young people (“The tree must be bent while it is young“). Pruned, crossed and bent branches point out to the adaptability of the human organism. From the moment we are born we change ourselves or we are changed by people or conditions. We can cut our capabilities or we can let them grow wild, like the gardener does with trees in a garden.

I develop these abstract figures to show invisible power, for example on the pages of an exercise book (series “School”). A child was making writing exercises and spent lots of energy on a small page. Especially school is a place where many positive and negative energies of thinking and feeling are bundled together.
The drop in my work represents the idea, that something is collecting until it gets too heavy and then falls down or bursts.
The heap is my favorite figure. I call this image “heap” instead of “pile” or “Haufen” (German) because the sound of this word is rising up like the shape, which grows to the sky or looks like something accumulated under a blanket. It can be a heap of money or a heap of unsolved problems. Also Mt. Fuji is a big heap. With its impressing shape and enormous size it became the most important figure of Japan. This form represents a dialectic principle. As obstacle in front of you it blocks the view. But if you take the trouble to climb up, the contrary is the case: the horizon expends.

In my work the heaps, branches, bundles, drops and other figures live their own lives. Isolated from their usual environment and translated into abstract images they become monumental characters of somewhat concentrated, accumulated, mantled. We are used to view the world in the way we know it. Possibly the heaps and bundles are simply vehicles to interrupt this view to help the brain finding other paths.

Beside drawings on paper 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. A tension between proximity and elusiveness 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.