CHRISTOF MASCHER – Alley Cat
Opening Friday, September 10, 2010, 7 p.m. – 9 p.m.

The Galerie Michael Janssen cordially invites you to the opening of the exhibition Alley Cat from Christof Mascher.
We will be pleased to show you around the exhibition during the opening.

Alley Cat is the second solo exhibition of the artist in the gallery. Born in Hanover in 1979, he studied at the College of Fine Arts in Braunschweig with Walter Dahn until 2009. On display are new works on wood, drawings on paper and a shadow play installation. His paintings and drawings are characterized by contradictions and ruptures. Fully painted elements stand next to unfinished ones, the gestural next to the ornamental and the abstract next to the representational. Ethereal remains of landscapes are either still under construction or already threatened by destruction. Mascher works on visual worlds in which nothing seems to make sense and therefore are open to all possibilities. Mascher processes influences from different sources; he is influenced by popular culture, such as scenarios from adventure games from the late 1980s, as well as by painters like Hieronymus Bosch, Pieter Breughel, Edvard Munch, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Phillip Guston. The architectural elements are partly alluding to old cartoons, expressionist silent films as The Cabinet of Dr.Caligari (1920) and Defa films from the 1970’s like The Black Mill (1975). Mascher paints on unusual surfaces, such as old Formica tables, copper plates and found pieces of wood. The works range from miniature to large sizes and have partially a dull, glazed surface, applied almost transparent or are thickly coated and have a shiny shellac finish.