Keinstar's personal goal is to radically question his own conventions and formal stereotypes without resorting to hyped discourses or virtual technologies, but to anachronistically create intuitive mysteries with classical sculpture.
The Cologne-based artist stages his new exhibition "Mysteries of Barbarism" as an aesthetic-material platform on which opposing concepts of high and low are arranged. Shapes and materials that seemingly don't fit together are brought together against aesthetic odds and set into a fluid slide in and out. Folded ceramic casts hang next to carbon fabric, bitumen geometry flows into graffiti quotes, sulfur-filled vents and bone artifacts attest to a ritualistic use of the platform. Within the decay of the sculptures and their deliberate deconstruction, barbarism emerges, an intermediate state of drastic detachment from the existing. This is of course not cultureless, as implied by the art system, but its rawness has an immediate and sexy effect.
The exhibition is complemented with works by Georg Baselitz. All of Keinstar's works have been created exclusively and space-related for the exhibition. The architecture of the art space is extended by an expansive platform of large-scale ceramics, defining itself as a total installation.
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Exhibition "Mysteries of Barbarism" featuring Georg Baselitz, September 1 to December 15, 2022, Schmidt-Drenhaus Foundation, Rösrather Str. 604, 51107 Cologne, more information
