Images of Architecture #1 || Thomas Ravens – Your New Quarters

13 July – 3 August 2019

The artist Thomas Ravens (* 1964), who lives in Berlin, consistently continues the pictorial research on the theme of landscape in his new works and now shows these and other of his pictures with speculative architectural scenarios under the title “Your New Quarters” at B-Part Exhibition. His urban landscapes, as expressive as they are surreal and gloomy, open the new exhibition series “Images of Architecture” by B-Part Exhibition.

The “New Quarters” in Ravens’ pictures seem partly futuristic and visionary, but these are only in the sense of a historical echo from a Le Corbusier modernism that has long since been overrun by a concept such as the “Anthropozene”. One suspects that all of the architecture depicted by Ravens will be destroyed, may even no longer exist, or may be in a permanently frozen, paradoxical state of extinction. One can think here of Walter Benjamin’s Storm of Progress, that “catastrophe that incessantly heaps rubble upon rubble” – while the sky running in the background seems to quote Albrecht Dürer’s “dream face”, that so haunting manifestation of unconscious fears.

Raven’s pictures, mostly ink drawings – also in vivid colours – thus pose contemporary questions with great urgency. The fact that new quarters do not stand on neutral ground can be seen in his paintings.

From 10 to 31 August, Roland Boden will then continue the exhibition series “Images of Architecture” under the title “Promise in the Field”. Boden’s seemingly dystopic paintings of abandoned architectures in their timelessness raise a present full of open questions.

Images of Architecture #1
Thomas Ravens – “Your New Quaters”
Exhibition: 13 July to 3 August 2019
Opening: Friday, 12 July 2019, 18-22 hours
B-Part Exhibition curated by loop
Opening hours: Wednesdays to Saturdays, 14-18 hrs