Brand New Gallery is delighted to present dystown, the first Italian one-man show by German artist Martin Kobe.

The exhibition gathers the fruits of the artist’s last two years of work, a production characterised by the meticulousness that distinguishes it. His canvases capture and render the impressions of a man born during the German Democratic Republic, who was able to witness Socialist urban planning during his childhood and has made architecture a fertile obsession. Martin Kobe’s work is likewise influenced by the images of his own collection of architecture drawings, travel photographs and a myriad of historical-artistic references ranging from Piranesi to Bauhaus. The result is timeless, visionary images, poised between reality and fiction, frozen into a new metaphysics where architectural forms are limited to suggesting sources, whispering a setting or a building without leaving a any sense of definable recognition of this. The implosion of the multiple vanishing points opens up a labyrinth of suspended façades and converging beams; these intersect, attracting spectators into a flow of space for which the voids are also read as pure surfaces. This process of idealisation of architecture culminates in colour, which increases its artificiality suggesting smooth planes, sometimes interrupted by traces of design and gestural features through which the paint is scraped off to the bare canvas to allow spectators to slide and fall into unresolved areas. The colours, strident also when they allow the forms to emerge in transparency, and the clear light that irradiates the surfaces, are used by the artist to create a structural fracture that breaks the literal reading of the space of the painting so as to give rise to a distorted utopia in which more rational architecture is engulfed by an expressionist, abstract painting, creating a tension between the technical and the organic, between physical and emotional space.

Martin Kobe was born in Dresden in 1973 and completed his artistic studies in Leipzig, where he currently lives and works.

In 2000 he graduated from the Leipzig Academy of Visual Arts, where he was a student of Arno Rink, under whom he gained a Master’s in painting three years later. After achieving recognitions such as the Special Award during the 6^th edition of the Kunstpreis der Leipziger and a study grant at the Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, his work has been exhibited in galleries of international renown, such as the White Cube in London, and even in important collections and museum exhibitions in Europe and the USA, including the touring exhibition Life After Death: New Leipzig Paintings from the Rubell Family Collection. In 2005 he was invited to participate in the 2^nd Prague Biennial, while in 2011 his work was selected by Barry Schwabsky to be included in the volume Vitamin P2: New Perspectives in Paintings.