Damien Deroubaix »Utopia Burns«

30 April - 13 June 2009

Damien Deroubaix: Utopia Burns, Installation view Filipp Rosbach Galerie, Leipzig 2009 /Courtesy Filipp Rosbach Galerie, Leipzig

Damien Deroubaix »Utopia Burns«
April 30—June 13, 2009

Karl Marx’s »Das Kapital« [1867–1894], for years in demand only from the usual suspects, is becoming a mass product as if overnight, and thereby a self-contradiction, but above all a symbol of a crisis of meaning: Utopia burns. Like the primary work of the great critic of capitalism, Damien Deroubaix’s works, too, seem more timely than ever, although the French painter has for years been unveiling the shadow sides of consumerism and marketing—in short, the Western societal system—in a raw punk-metal aesthetic.

In sculptures, drawings, collages, and woodcuts, but above all in large-format watercolors, Deroubaix processes current political and social themes in a collage-like sign language, for which he recruits skeletons and skulls, soldiers and carnivorous animals, idols and advertising models—and raises them to the level of icons. Inspired by Albrecht Dürer, Pablo Picasso, and Francis Bacon as well as by Grindcore and Death Metal Bands, the 36-year-old creates a surrealistic theater whose stage is fringed with barbed wire and surveillance cameras and remains dark despite all the light bulbs, spotlights, and sun disks.

Serving as an important reference system for Deroubaix’s many-layered work is the omnipresent advertising machinery, which peddles everything and everyone from sex toys to anti-terror wars; he unmasks their methods of presentation and converts them to stage his pictures’ protagonists. Text balloons borrowed from cheap mail-order catalogs and breathed into the picture by skeletons and bare-breasted models whose reduction, as if by amputation, to body parts effective in advertising is drastically conspicuous thus praise a morality molded by capitalism, a morality whose hypocrisy is impossible to overlook. The text fragments characteristic of Deroubaix’s works are also found in oversized, picture-immanent titles, with which the painter—taking visual recourse to advertising slogans by graphic designers—stages his pictures themselves [Grinders, 2006]. The content of the titles, in part ironic-sarcastic and in part cryptic, often alludes to songs by Punk or Metal bands [Utopia Burns, 2007, Morale, 2006] and fuses with visual quotations from art history [Roots, 2008, Luilekkerland 1 and 2, 2007], photographs from World War II [Milka Kuh 2, 2007], or the daily press to form a dense conglomerate of signs; this is what characterizes Deroubaix’s socially critical works.

Damien Deroubaix, born in 1972 in Lille, France, lives and works in Berlin. In parallel to the exhibition in Leipzig, he is taking part in the triennial »La Force de l’Art 02« at the Grand Palais, Paris and was recently nominated for the Prix Marcel Duchamp. In September 2009, his exhibition tour »Die Nacht« [The Night] begins; it will be shown in the Saarlandmuseum Saarbrücken, the Villa Merkel in Esslingen, and the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen.
—Conny Becker /translated by Mitch Cohen

Publication:
»Damien Deroubaix—World Downfall« | 2008 edited by Nosbaum & Reding, Luxemburg and in Situ fabien leclerce, Paris | English, 56 pages, full colour, hardcover | Texts by Nuit Banai und Max Henry | ISBN 978-2-9599765-1-3



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The gallery is open Tuesday to Saturday from 11 am to 6 pm.
Josef Filipp, Michaela Rosbach, and Jörg Rosbach look forward to your visit.
For additional information and viewing appointments, call: +49 [0] 172.373 11 10

www.filipprosbach.com

Damien Deroubaix: Utopia Burns, Installation view Filipp Rosbach Galerie, Leipzig 2009 /Photo: Waltraud Grubitzsch /Courtesy Filipp Rosbach Galerie, Leipzig

Damien Deroubaix: Un homme nouveau, 2008, Woodcut on paper, 160 x 122 cm, Ed. 14 /Private collection Leipzig /Private collection Berlin /Courtesy Filipp Rosbach Galerie, Leipzig

Damien Deroubaix: Morale, 2006, Water color, acrylic, ink, collage on paper, 330 x 450 cm /Courtesy Filipp Rosbach Galerie, Leipzig

Damien Deroubaix: Utopia Burns, 2007, Water color, acrylic, ink, collage on paper, 250 x 400 cm /Courtesy Filipp Rosbach Galerie, Leipzig

Damien Deroubaix: Grinders, 2006, Water color, collage on paper, 330 x 450 cm /Courtesy Filipp Rosbach Galerie, Leipzig

Damien Deroubaix: Luilekkerland-2, 2007, Water color, acrylic, ink on paper, 150 x 200 cm /Courtesy Filipp Rosbach Galerie, Leipzig

Damien Deroubaix: Luilekkerland-1, 2007, Water color, acrylic, ink on paper, 150 x 200 cm /Courtesy Filipp Rosbach Galerie, Leipzig

Damien Deroubaix: Dissident /Agressor, 2008, Woodcut on paper, 160 x 122 cm, Ed. 14 /Courtesy Filipp Rosbach Galerie, Leipzig

Damien Deroubaix: Roots, 2008, Woodcut on paper, 160 x 122 cm, Ed. 14 /Courtesy Filipp Rosbach Galerie, Leipzig