Contemporary Art Daily

We are pleased to announce Axel Geis’ third solo exhibition at Galerie Wentrup, entitled Die Wildgänse kommen [The Greylag Geese are Coming].

Apart from new paintings, Axel Geis is also showing works on paper – for the first time in a gallery show. So far, he has only shown works on paper in the 2008 comprehensive solo show at Kunsthalle Mannheim.

Oil on paper enables Geis to quickly execute painterly ideas. For his idiosyncratic visualizations, paper serves as support for oil paints. The works on paper are not sketches for paintings; rather, paper and canvas are for Axel Geis two independent sides of his art.

At the centre of Axel Geis’ paintings are humans and their tragic entanglements and absurd situations. The models for his works can be either private photographs or other paintings or films.

One point of departure for his latest works is the 1933 film Island of Lost Souls. Inspired by stills from that film, we now find in Geis’ latest paintings a dog motif, either alone or in a pack, both dissociated from narrative contexts and integrated in complex visual compositions.

The unfinished quality of the pictures and the partial dissolution of the figurative into the abstract shows that Geis sees his various models as a starting point and not as an obligation.

His main subject – both in the works on canvas and paper – remains painting itself.