Till Gerhard
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Till Gerhard (born 1971 in Hamburg, Germany) is an artist based in Hamburg.
Till Gerhard studied at Muthesius Hochschule fur Kunst und Gestaltung, Keil (1992-93) and the Hochschule fur angewandte Wissenschaften, FB Gestaltung Professor Dieter Glasmacher, Hamburg (1993-98).
He has exhibited in many shows including “Ohne uns hatte man Beton” at SKAMraum [1], Hamburg, “Nerdism” at Zeughaus, Hamburg and “Ein Tag, Ein Raum, Ein Bild” at Sebastien Fath Contemporary in Mannheim. Gerhard has shown internationally at museums and galleries such as San Francisco Museum of Modern Art [2], Arndt & Partner [3] in Zurich and Stellan Holm Gallery [4] in New York. He is represented by ARTBOX in Frankfurt, Galleri K [5] in Oslo and Ikon Ltd. [6] in California.
Gerhard’s romantic paintings emanate eerie undertones of spiritual isolation, sectarianism and insinuated depravity, unnervingly referenced through popular culture and current events. Reinventing the genre of sublime landscape as contemporary parable, Gerhard’s epic scenes of rural community are painted with supernatural intensity, alluding to a disquietly sinister corruption of Utopia. Rendered with the placid realism of religious illustrations, Gerhard’s large-scale canvases invoke a nostalgic sentiment of 19th century Transcendentalism and a thematic suggestion of filmic narrative; seeking solace in the divine harmony of wilderness, his figures become both victims and perversions of their idyllic environments.
Gerhard designs the sacred milieu of landscape with painterly mysticism. Delicate spills of colour seduce with ethereal glow, while heavy brushwork stands in stark contrast to flourishes of drips, splashes and smears. Gerhard poses his vistas as simultaneously beautiful and foreboding: trees tower with threat, and light is conceived as spectral hues, giving the canvases the illusion of radiating from within. Each beam of light has the effect of floating out of the canvas, embracing the viewer in its contaminated warmth.
Gerhard’s paintings explore the conflict between man and nature. Within his scenes is a recurring intrusion of unnatural entity: oil wells and tree forts exude an encroaching anxiety. Gerhard uses their odd presence as a departure into the surreal: a cabin nestled in the woods or a skyline dotted with refineries are both alien and comforting as their surrounding landscapes stretch, float and churn with hallucinatory disorientation. In this conflicted crusade for spiritual revelation and ideological orthodoxy, ghost-like figures mill about lost in their Thoreau-inspired quest for enlightenment.
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