Christian Gonzenbach: Domestic wildlife collection

Artist list

Christian Gonzenbach

In his latest works exhibited at Gallery SO Christian Gonzenbach explores the paradoxical existence of things. Describing himself as "a producer of art", Christian constructs an alternate reality, a phantasmagorical, liminal world of the in-between, where things are simultaneously both real and unreal. Like an explorer, Christian Gonzenbach looks for mutable possibilities inside the existing world, posing the perennial question: "What happens if...?"

Surrounding the central installation at the heart of the exhibition, Christian has juxtaposed structures that tease us through their incomplete resemblance to what we know: a donkey turned inside out; boots made of ostrich leather that oscillate between animal and human; an animated film starring a stuffed chicken and a stuffed marten; a collection of burnt butterflies; flint stones carved from eraser rubber.

These ambivalent structures reflect something both absent and yet still present: they reside in the blank between the physical and spiritual world in which the missing content is filled by our own perception. In these works the artist strives to identify the point at which the world turns upside down into the absurd, the grotesque or the poetic. For Christian Gonzenbach, the world is not as axiomatic as it appears. It could just as easily be different: impossibly Other.