Untitled

Stretching across four giant panels, Gert and Uwe Tobias monumental woodcut playfully embraces modernist geometric abstraction, decorative motifs, and folk-art redolent of the twin brothers' Transylvanian childhood. Flowers, figures and abstract forms fuse and metamorphose into each other in Untitled, creating a surreal, colourful tableau that indulges fantasy and carries a boldly graphic appeal. The brothers, who have worked together since 2001, have devised a unique technique that treads the boundaries between painting and print work. In contrast to traditional woodcuts, where patterns are cut directly into the wood, they apply ink onto cut wooden shapes, building up layers freehand to create the irregular, grainy antiquated effect that is so characteristic of their work.

Having moved to Germany in 1985, the Romanian-born artists studied in Braunschweig and now live and work in Cologne. Their experimental practice also extends to ceramics, where they transform mass-produced crockery into expressionist sculpture, and also drawing on their colourful visual vocabulary of eccentric forms and shapes, repeating and morphing into complex geometric abstraction. Dissolving boundaries between craft and fine art, high and low culture, abstract concepts and flights of fancy, Gert and Uwe Tobias's work manages to be intensely subjective and carry a universal resonance, uniting national symbols, archetypes and their own personal biography.