Peter Dobroschke: Stop & Go

In his first solo exhibition in Munich, Peter Dobroschke makes reference to the immediate surroundings of the gallery rooms. The view through the broad glazed frontage of the traffic on the intersection of Franziskanerstrasse and Gebsattelstrasse becomes part of the “Stop & Go” exhibition. The video and photo installations reflect Dobroschke’s eye for movement and stasis into the interior of the gallery, playing with visitors’ perception and visual habits.

The goings-on in the street outside are integrated visually and acoustically into the exhibition, in which, time and again, both familiar and unexpected street furniture is encountered. Duplication, reflection, and nesting of the pictorial elements are constants in the work of the artist as he explores the interaction between truth and illusion. Boundaries blur, and suddenly there are a number of superimposed shifting realities.

In the process, the artists casts an eye on his personal surroundings, reacting in his works to the habitat and working environment in which he moves. The starting point is mostly a chance situation, such as two identical cars being offered for sale next to each other, a mattress parked on a balcony, or a paper streamer entangled and thus immobilized in a railing. Other works result from observations deriving from a routine. Thus the route, or alternative routes, between home and studio, forms the theme of two works at the exhibition. If there are several routes of more or less the same length, which one is chosen? Is it, in the words of the proverb, really better to travel hopefully than to arrive? Covering the course, and also the stationary period before or after a movement, evoke, when seen more abstractly, fundamental considerations on decision-making processes and life-planning.

Photographed or filmed reality, while staged by decisions on cropping and form of presentation, is not otherwise changed or arranged by intervention. One can see, therefore, what Dobroschke sees, and through his eyes. Questions of presentation thus play a particularly important role and represent a central theme of the creative process, which is an inseparable part of the work. The ‘making of’ the work is just as important as the work itself, and deliberately remains visible. The same is true of the setting up, dismantling and transport of the works, as hinted at in certain places. Everything is part of a process, in motion, and nothing is definitively determined. The exhibition is a snapshot for which Peter Dobroschke has, so to speak, pressed the stop button, paused for breath, and then continued.

Peter Dobroschke was born in Lich near Giessen in 1977. After training as a woodcarver, he studied at the Academy of Visual Arts in Munich, and at the University of the Arts in Berlin, where he was a master pupil of Christiane Möbus. Dobroschke has received a number of scholarships, and won several prizes, most recently the Studio Prize of the Karl Hofer Society, and the Georg Meistermann Scholarship. His works have been shown at numerous solo and group exhibitions, for example at the NBK, Berlin; the Forum für aktuelle Kunst, Münster; the Lenbachhaus, Munich; the Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin; and the Kunsthaus, Essen. He lives and works in Berlin.