New drawings by Malte Spohr

Until mid-December, the Hegenbarth Collection Berlin is showing new drawings by Malte Spohr, created from a work by Josef Hegenbarth and his own photographs for the presentation in the Schaudepot. Other works on paper from the collection by Willi Baumeister, Peter Brüning, Carl Buchheister, Karl Fred Dahmen, Max Ernst, Karl Otto Götz, Horst Janssen, and Nicole Schuck complete the presentation.

The brush drawing ‘Waldinneres’ [Inside the Forest] from 1950 is one of the rare pure landscape motifs in Hegenbarth’s oeuvre. There, a monumental rock formation in the foreground and a densely grown forest vegetation in the background spread out in the sheet-filling depiction. The ambivalent depiction, in which all parts consist of a few brushstrokes, opens up space for the viewer to make imaginative interpretations of the picture.

Malte Spohr transforms from it four pencil drawings of equal size, which associate structures as they possibly extend in the subterranean-hidden. With these appearances of the invisible, the moving, the hidden communications between mushroom mycelium and tree root, Malte Spohr shows us his sensations as 'forest interior reloaded'.

The drawings of the series are titled ‘Waldinneres reloaded 01 to 04’. They can hardly be distinguished from each other due to their technique-related monochrome. Malte Spohr does not seem to be aiming for an overall image of the forest. Rather, each drawing seems like the enlarged section of a superorganism.

Biography of Malte Spohr

The monograph Malte Spohr. Aufzeichnungen 1994—2018 (mpk Museum Pfalzgalerie Kaiserslautern) is available at the exhibition for the price of €19.80.