Since he graduated in photography at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art under the supervision of Thomas Ruff, Martin Denker (1976, Hamburg) has been combining his job as Andreas Gursky’s assistant with his own artistic work. Agglomerate of (appropriated) images from –among other sources—the world wide web, Denker’s “Goooooooglescapes...” as Franz-Xaver Schlegel qualified his latest photographic works spread as maelstroms of painterly organic and geometrical forms of acidulated colours. Keeping on with the experiments with post-production techniques initiated by his artistic tutor, Thomas Ruff, Denker creates a visual symphony to contemporary society’s media overkill in a vein that reminds one as much of pop art as of Surrealist painting and its derived 1970’s psychedelic visions. With the help of digital technology, Denker combines, adjusts and levels a multiplicity of different materials in order to create images of great pictorial force. Seen on a computer screen, a work such as “Medicine Square Garde, Paris Hilton Syndrom” (above figure) could be mistaken for a painting, one that suggests a relationship with James Rosenquist’s panoramas with its dynamic curves and its obvious interest in the relation between popular culture, science and technology. As Denker says, “I'm striving for what remains if I try to collage hundreds of visual glimpses out of my own digital photos, found visual materials which can be pictures, downloads, as well as objects I put on the scanner directly (from banana ice-cream to the plastic-wrapping of toast or platines from computer devices). I work in collages, but not physically. With digital programs I can use algorythms to shift the information of texture, color and form of digital files. What remains looks like an "image" between painting and photography.”

Over the past few years, Jochen Mühlenbrink (1980, Freiburg) has come to prominence with his paintings of street scenes and urban-scapes. Schooled at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art under the supervision of controversial German painter Markus Lüpertz (who was dedicated a retrospective exhibition at the Stedelijk, Amsterdam, in 1997), Mühlenbrink has already taken part to several significant museum shows all around Germany. His exquisitely painted vistas result from layering multiple translucent coats of paint. Ranging from acidulated colors to black, his palette stages extreme, baroque-like contrasts. Alongside ‘modern life’ painting of the mid-nineteenth century, Bauhaus’ functional structures and the eerie atmosphere of Metaphysical painting can be seen as Mühlenbrink’s primary artistic influences. Together with fellows from Berlin, Dresden and Leipzig, Mühlenbrink can be counted among the most talented of Germany’s new generation of artists. Both nostalgic and futuristic, Mühlenbrink works, featuring busy highways, desolate backyards and church-like skyscrapers’ interiors, convey a feeling of perplexity and expectation that might be “a reflection…of the situation in Germany at the beginning of the new millennium.” For his exhibition at TORCH, he will be presenting a new series of snow-scapes, which, in the best tradition of German painting, transcend mere figurativeness to attain the realms of metaphor.

From the 8th of September till the 20th of October, the exhibition J-pics vs. Mpegs, New Photowork from Düsseldorf by Martin Denker and New Painting from Düsseldorf by Jochen Mühlenbrink, is to be seen at TORCH Gallery, Amsterdam. Both artists will be present during the opening on the 8th of September from 16:00 till 18:00.