CHRISTOPH ROßNER
TIME IS ON MY SIDE

OPENING: SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 14TH, 2020
EXHIBITION DATES: NOV. 14 - JAN. 9, 2021

Romer Young Gallery is pleased to present Time Is On My Side, a new exhibition with German painter Christoph Roßner. This is the gallery’s fourth solo exhibition with the artist.

I get the feeling that my paintings are kind of stuck in a past time, or even falling out of time.

Home, in this moment, has taken on a new kind of indeterminacy and has positioned many people worldwide at a newly ambiguous intersection of architecture and psychology. Home, once a dwelling space for living, now serves as an “everything” space for shelter, work, school, exercise, social engagement, entertainment, recreation, activity, refuge, and everything in between. As the world isolates due to a global lockdown, we have collectively been re-engaged in our domestic spaces and increasingly aware of how our interior spaces affect our moods, our ability to work, our physical comfort, our relationships, as well as our sense of time and space. Everything looks the same and yet everything is different.

Created between 2018 and 2020, Time Is On My Side presents a series of interior still life paintings that offer a poetic, absurd and prescient look into the psychology of domestic spaces. Inspired by comic books, Matisse, and a general love of the mundane, Roßner extracts snippets of backgrounds that he finds and, combined with chance and his own dreamlike whimsy, transforms the paintings into intriguing and curious spaces. The arrangement of things, interiors and surrounding environments are at once familiar and otherworldly. Endlessly fascinated with the more ordinary objects that surround us - bookshelves, bottles, tables, arrangements of flowers - the artist uses our familiarity with these items and spaces as an opportunity to re-frame and re-introduce as strange, both physically and psychologically. In their transformed shape and environment, they are newly worthy of depiction. These new paintings also feature an ironic new cast of characters - most notably calendars and clocks. The calendars have no dates and the clocks tell no time, alluding to the blurring of days and the unsettling sense of repetition and timelessness. With no characters in the paintings, the inanimate objects become the main protagonists of Rossner’s paintings and ultimately, the harbingers of an unusual reality.

Roßner writes: “I enjoy the idea that walking through the show could feel like wandering around in a strange but friendly house and each painting is a different room.” His paintings are not simply to be understood as a visualization of ideas but rather, as the discovery of the idea itself. In this case, the search for ambiguity leading to the reality of ambiguity. “Once plague had shut the
gates of the town, they had settled down to a life of separation, debarred from the living warmth that gives forgetfulness of all.
- Albert Camus.

We are living in a period of abstractions. The pandemic has understandably spurred feelings of unrest, grief and anxiety among many and something as simple as color has the power to enhance and aggravate those feelings, or assuage and calm them. With the ease of his brushstroke and his choice of keyed up, brighter pastel pinks and yellows, Rossner deftly translates interiors into compositions of form and color that soften and offer respite from, if only for a moment, the malaise of the current reality.

CHRISTOPH ROßNER received his BFA at the Bauhaus University in Weimar, 2006 and his MFA at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts in 2011. He completed his master studies with Prof. Ralf Kerbach. Recent museum and institutional exhibitions include Oblomow (solo), Leonhardi-Museum, Dresden, DE, Heft eins (with Jakob Flohe), FAK Foerderverein aktuelle Kunst, Münster, Anonyme Zeichner, Kunstraum Bethanien, Berlin. Recent solo and two person exhibitions include, Gewinner & Verlierer, dst.galerie, Münster, DE, two artists you should know (with Lucie Freynhagen), Zygote Press, Cleveland. Group exhibitions include, Société, C.Rockefeller Center, Dresden, WIN/WIN Ankäufe der Kulturstiftung des Freistaates Sachsen, Halle 14, Leipzig, ALL STAR CAST, Galerie Baer, Dresden, Habeas Corpus, Halsey McKay Gallery, East Hampton NY. Roßner has received several awards and residencies including Förderstipendium Talentschmiede, Dresden, Zygote Press Residency, Cleveland, Heimspiel - Kulturstiftung des Freistaates Sachsen Scholarship. His work is in the public collections of Kunstfond, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Deutsche Nationalbibliothek Frankfurt, Sächsische Landes-und Universitätsbibliothek Dresden.

Due to the ever changing COVID restrictions we ask that you make an appointment to view the exhibition in person. You can use email the gallery directly at info@romeryounggallery.com. We also offer live video gallery tours by appointment on FaceTime or WhatsApp.