Galerie Adler New York City is pleased to announce the New York solo debut of German artist Sebastian Gögel.


In Sebastian Gögel’s (*1978 Thuringia, Germany) artworks, the world takes on the appearance of a confusing place full of permanent contradictions and conflicts. His particular artistic approach consists of portraying everywhere in his pictures subterranean traps, hiding-places and secrets, as well as fissures and hidden backgrounds, and of turning all dimensions topsy-turvy. A gloomy world is opened to view and shown to be inhabited by hermaphroditic beings situated somewhere between humans and animals, between both known and unknown stages of an ongoing evolution.

The views presented by Gögel invert reality into its opposite: inner worlds are turned inside out, the skin is stripped away from bodies to reveal their fleshy and formless substance, extremities are twisted and elongated, heads are inflated, eyes shifted and noses stretched excessively. The spaces are confusing pitfalls in which may be found every imaginable fear and tension. Gögel creates an exaggerated pandemonium in which all sorts of inscrutable and incomprehensible fantasies attain their artistic form. He plays a game of distortion and mirroring right up to its very limits: in many of his pictures, the artist continuously multiplies various meanings and statements.

This excessive degree of energy and expressiveness is offset again and again by works whose sobriety and purity stand in contrast to the grand pastose gesture, and in which Gögel depicts a spectrum of strained exertion on both the individual and social level, inasmuch he causes the protagonists to grow rigid within a strict hierarchy and a self-imposed discipline. He repeatedly paints and draws the embittered and contorted physiognomies of various personalities. These figures give expression to a degenerated social world in which everyone attempts to see through, to assess and to deceive everyone else. Beneath the sign of spurious respect and feigned interest, all esteem for others is surreptitiously discarded, and one’s own advantage is single-mindedly sought after.

Oil and Acrylics on canvas, 2006

Sebastian Gögel’s universe is populated by monstrous creatures, which on one hand emanate a miraculous, even child-like charm, on the other hand, however, look dark and menacing.

Gallery Adler, Frankfurt am Main, from November 3, 2005 until January 7, 2006 presents in a solo exhibition paintings, drawings and sculptures by the young Leipzig artist (*1978, Sonneberg/Thüringen).

Sebastian Gögel’s paintings show animal-like creatures reminiscent of myths and legends that might themselves be protagonists of a saga. They posses dark aesthetics, exercising an attraction as strange as it is engrossing, similar to the impression of a dangerous but strangely bewitching underwater animal behind a thick aquarium window pane from which you just can’t take you eyes off. The latent aggressiveness resonating in the pictures emerges from emotion: “I feel like these creatures”, Gögel explains, “they are portraits of interpersonal subtleties.”

His figures grow out of themselves, are created without prior sketches. Aiming at the closest possible approach to his intuition, he coats the canvas in layers and layers of colour, each new brushstroke is like a confession of failure, covering something that should not exist like it does.

This way to approach motives intuitively is characteristic for the young Leipzig painter. Consequently, his paintings are many things at a time: beautiful, but creepy, calm but aggressive - the blue Collector, whose velvety outlines are silhouetted against the background like downy feathers and remind one of a dove’s or an angel’s wings, is crushing the heads of the small black figures it is holding in his hand.

The basic idea of simplifying complex structures and coherences but still permitting a wide range of possible interpretations can be found in Sebastian Gögel's sculptural work alike, for instance in his 7 feet high “Dark Planet” and his strange interior. With his “intermediaries”, small, three-legged and long-nosed friendly figures made of rigid foam, he creates a simple but in this simplicity extremely comprehensive system for depiction of social relations. The seven edgeless figures looking “like huge key fobs”, are wild cards for any possible interpersonal screenshots and can be combined freely. Gögel makes one intermediary stand on the noses of three others and calls it “ Birthday”, makes one stand a little aside and calls it “Maverick”.

With the miraculous, partly almost child-like charm coming from Sebastian Gögel’s works, the young artist constructs that kind of allusions of a universal truth which is more to be felt than to be known, less even to be understood, but which in spite and because of this fascinates each generation anew and which to seek is an eternal and never-ending process - “for this”, Sebastian Gögel explains, “is what art is about - being immortal”.

Collector, Purpur (2004) Oil and Acrylics on canvas