Franz Josef Altenburg & Pedro Boese
Emmanuel Walderdorff Galerie, Molsberg
In times of great innovation, in which the individual must also constantly reinvent themselves, the collective longing for familiar certainties inevitably grows on the other side. For society, this describes a mechanism that is only temporarily valid and can produce good and bad things in equal measure. Art history, however, knows no other way. The conflict between innovation and continuity is its inevitable driving force, and at the same time can raise tricky questions: How can an artistic line be designed that does not lead in circles? How do I manage to establish points of contact within my art without risking signs of wear and tear?
Only a few succeed in developing a formal language at the very beginning of their artistic lives that guarantees them the security of their very own expression without being a corset. Franz Josef Altenburg and Pedro Boese are among these rare exceptions. But this is not the only analogy that has prompted us to complement the wonderful collaboration on Altenburg's retrospective exhibition at the Keramikmuseum Westerwald (15 July - 19 November 2023) with a contemporary position from a different medium. Both artists work almost exclusively with basic geometric forms and have links to Concrete Art. In contrast to Concrete Art, they are not concerned with a reduction to an abstract and universalistic basis of form, but on the contrary - they search above all for the origins of the individual. (...)
Text: Julius Tambornino