Christoph Rode & Benjamin Burkard

James Wright Gallery is proud to announce Bittersüß, an exhibition of works by German born artists Benjamin Burkard and Christoph Rode. Both artists using montage to disassociate with the constraints of time and tangible narratives.

Reality competes with closed eyes The infinite montages of senses reassigned A painful pleasure The bittersweet taste lingers Of lust, violence, melody and silence A symphony that brings the sky to its knees And humans to the machine.

Together in their approach to muddle the truth based off our recollection and performance of the past, Burkard & Rode combine politics and interpretive narratives to proliferate discussions of determining the authenticity of the world around us.

Benjamin Burkard -- Born 1986, Kandel (Rheinland-Pfalz) Germany

Benjamin Burkard explores the complexity of the relationship with ecology and technological evolution. Burkard’s paintings offer mechanical, physical, biological, cognitive, and social feedbacks in order to understand and define the functions and processes of embodied systems.

His visual manipulations of animals, humans, plants, and recalled incomplete dreams, are the pillars in his tales of the unfolding future. Machines move in the background, merging with these prominent biological elements, making a net of life that exhales in each canvas. Burkard’s ongoing invention of abstracted new landscapes, filled with a camouflaged underpainting of machines, allows his viewers to make a choice in their allusions- to recognize the inevitable rise of the artificial, or not.

Christoph Rode -- Born 1984, Berlin-Marzahn Germany

Christoph Rode’s platform of preach imitates the redundancy of concrete landscapes, amongst a mountain range of utopic-like masses. Like Burkard, Christoph Rode is an observer of his surroundings, with a focus on the external behavior of fragmented reality. By using a wide variety of found and manipulated media images, Rode removes the element of time as a harness, allowing unnamed characters and motifs to clash dimensions on stage. The communication between these visual script holders takes place only by body gesticulation, offering a open dialogue with innumerable interpretations.