Note

Gert and Uwe Tobias are twin brothers who were born in the Transylvania region of Romania and moved to Germany at age twelve. They returned to visit Romania as adults, to learn more about the country and their heritage, forming a deep understanding of their personal and cultural underpinnings. They also explored the Dracula story, so common in people’s association with the region, in terms of literature and popular culture. Their work thus incorporates campy horror movies, Eastern European folk art, Surrealism, and a working method that is unique to their relationship. They collaborate in their artistic practice to make sculpture, “typewriter drawings,” ceramics, and large-scale woodcut prints like the present Untitled from 2005.

The Tobias brothers employ three studios, one for each of them and one they share, passing works back and forth, commenting on each other’s processes, adding their own takes on a work, and sometimes finishing each other’s projects, and in the end, they both sign their names to the finished product. For their unusually large woodcut prints, the brothers collaborate on drawings and then use a machine to cut the giant woodblock, going back to make adjustments and printing by hand. The works rely on one of the oldest forms of printing, historically used to reach a wide audience, but the Tobias prints are usually unique or very limited in their printing editions.

The present print shows their clever play with abstraction and figuration, the figure constructed of colored shapes, circles, and spirals, its head reduced to one eye looking up outside the frame. The massive scale of the print makes it all-encompassing, akin to their wall designs but in a moveable format. As Bob Nickas wrote on the occasion of the 2006 Tobias exhibition at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, “there is a depth of feeling in their work that resonates with this sense of time, of myths, legends, and death.” The viewer is enveloped here, by the dark, somber colors, and the bold, graphic quality of the composition, while also acutely aware of the handmade quality of the print. Untitled is an important example of this unique collaboration.

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Lot 58

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