GODsDOGs 

PER RUBIGO ET OSSA – DURCH ROST UND KNOCHEN 

Vernissage March 16th, 6 - 10pm
Exhibition continues, March 17 - April 13 by appointment

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GODsDOGs is an artist collective run by Britta Adler and Ron Helbig. With their background in dance and physical theatre, they bring a choreographic approach to the visual arts, incorporating a range of different disciplines and techniques including installation, painting, performance, photography, dance, sculpture, collage and new media. Their solo exhibition at Karl Oskar Gallery presents a vision which stands in stark contrast to staid, well-behaved, polite minimalism — a vision which may be best described as modern Baroque, concerned with celebrating the divine and the worldly, and everything in between. 

The duo began their journey as a part of “Artists Anonymous”, a collective based in Berlin and London, founded in 2001 while the members were studying at University of the Arts in Berlin. Adler and Helbig went on to form GODsDOGs, thus deepening their interest in representing the paradoxical nature of the human condition, characterised by profound suffering and the promise of great redemption. Their work is an attempt to create new experiential spaces that inspire awe and represent the drama of life itself.

Their installations are created using a complex arrangement of smaller parts, mirroring the organic laws of the natural world. "They are actually fractal structures (beautifully described by mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot) " says Adler, likening them to the infinitely self-similar and repetitive patterns seen in trees. Humble materials like cardboard are reworked into delicate shapes, and natural elements like twigs and dried leaves celebrating a connection to the organic world. In their work Ziegenturm, branches are fashioned into a creature-like form, bent and fragile at first glance, yet sturdy despite its filigree components.

Adler and Helbig describe their sculptures as magical, totemic objects, brimming with witchy energy. In this sense, they are closer to sigils in character than purely artistic pieces. The sculptures, formed from cardboard, are cut in an intuitive process, beginning at first with smaller triangles and parallelograms which are then fashioned together into a skeleton of a greater structure. The object is coated with a paste made of paper mache, sanded, and further prepared for drawing and painting upon.

In late 2017, GODsDOGs began working on a new series of digitally transformed photo- works. Their digital development procedure is based on the Pseudo-Solarization process (done manually by Man Ray & Lee Miller), which is also called “Sabattier Effekt”. It involves digitally transforming the gradation diagonal (“Tonwertdiagonale”) of an image into a sine curve. “One could also say that we fold it.”, says Britta Adler who just read “The Fold – Leibniz und der Barock” by Gilles Deleuzes. Partial overexposure and underexposure give rise to inversions in which parts of the image appear positive and others negative. This "glitch" / "Störung” creates surreal color changes and hyperreal edge enhancements that permeate the images with a mythical feel. 

Ron Helbig states: “This was important to us, since we have evolved from our artistic practice as members of the artists group “Artists Anonymous”, where we painted negative oil paintings and inverted them to photographic after-images with a clear separation between positive and negative, to a more complex worldview and a more intertwined artistic approach.” They call these transformed photographic images “intermediates” - “Zwischenraumbilder” - as they oscilliate between differing and sometimes antagonising poles.