Tobias Freude and Christiane Osann: inner and outer view.

The inner and the outer view

The contemporary art of Christiane Osann and Tobias Freude and their confirmation of gender roles

Archiv Galerie, Friedberg

Pfarrstraße 6

86316 Friedberg

Opening Hours:

Friday 16.00-19.00 pm

Satursday/Sunday 11.00 am to 19.00 pm

For visits at other times call +49 (0)821 2799302

Christiane Osann creates in a way feminist art. She has, although born in Bavaria, even studied in Northgermany's left-wing city Bremen. But nevertheless the first picture to compare her art with is an contemporary advertisment motive showing a little boy unter the header "Deutschland".

My problem and approach is now, after a nice exhibition and a long talk the art historian Cornelia Kleyboldt gave, to catch the difference. This is, because I'm sure both artists Christiane Osann and Tobias Freude, who showed his land-art at the Archiv-Galerie in Friedberg at the same exhibition as his girlfriend Christiane, are really nice indeed and far away from political programmes of reduction to reproduction.

Osann's small sculptures are looking tidy, nice, propper. They do not have any nature around them, they are not moved by any game, event or other action. Actually, they are in such a nearly

exaggerated way alone, that the difference between a boy with a dog and a face in a TV in a small environment reduces to zero.

As lonesome as they are standing around, they are looking. Their eyes are small slits, emphazising the impression of being masked.

Lifeliness and thus, the unreal of the sceneries - especially visible in her creation out of cardboard boxes for milk (a.s.o.), a city just inhabited by some hares, - are the very difference to the above mentioned advertisement.

Photos show that reading this art as surrealism and eclosion from young woman to a more mother-like self consciousness is not impossible, especially, because the female puppets or "sculptures" - the artist calls them "big for me" - look like the artist herself.

It's a kind of still hanging around in worn out theories, when I have a kind of "suspect" here that the "feminist" emancipation of the puppethouse into art - in a way a sensation - not accidentially succeeds in Germany's region of the most extreme conservatism.

Let's shift to her male partner Tobias Freude now.

He builds her the catwalk - accidentally with things he finds in the surroundings of exhibition's places and nature as such. In Bremen he worked a lot with sea landscapes and their relation to the city, changing details in the landscape in a kind of concurrence to the sea's scallops, stones to color; but in cities stones at public places one cultural stage higher to scriptures. In Friedberg, he represents himself as a technician, alienating old wheels with silkpaper to offer them to new looks and impressions. Just decorative? It's, like art historian Kleyboldt explains, a kind of hermeneutics the artist develops and evoces. We start to compare the wheels with other technical details of the room and the surrounding architecture: the lightening system, the structure of the wall that can be seen through the window.

while watching the artists and the talk-giving art historian. Stripes, slits and sandstone, history, like on the right, traditionalism, is what we are looking at then.

A lightening system with white plates, enlightened by the wheels, in the same way heterogenously tilted. Thus, the old and the new technical objects become an allusion to the next stage of technical development, satellites - and we remember the TV in Osanns sculptures.

In complete opposit to Osann, Freude activates the views and even the eyes of the art-watchers at the exhibition. Not dead slits, but very lively "technical objects" concerning the own eyes.

Likewise work scrubs as surface of some blue photographs in the exhibition, showing a landscape through thorns and small photographical documents of Tobias Freude's landart projects in the staircase of the Archive Gallery.

Report and photos with Sony Ericsson Handy by Dr. Ulrike Ritter