To enjoy art, you visit a museum. Go to a gallery. Leafs through a catalogue. Much better, however, is a look into a real studio, preferably including an artist talk. The group offers exactly this opportunity plastic, which will open its workshops for the tenth time next weekend. At five locations, members plus guest artists, a total of 16 creative people, show their work – paintings, photographs and sculptures.
In 2011, Inge Schmidt and Rosemarie Hingerl began to put out feelers
The desire to cover exactly this range with an annual event was the reason why Inge Schmidt and Rosemarie Hingerl began in 2011 to put out feelers for an exhibition collective to colleagues in the northern district of Ebersberg. Schmidt remembers: “We definitely wanted to be present in Parsdorf, Anzing, Poing and Markt Schwaben.” Even then, the basic idea was that those interested could combine the visit with a small excursion. It is now around 17 kilometers that have to be covered between the studios in the four communities. And maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea at all to do this by bike to let the impressions linger in the fresh air in between.
Bjarne Geiges, a photographer from Munich, would like to “tell his own story that goes beyond what is visible”.
(Photo: organizer)
For example after the “Encounters” staged by Maria Heller. Originally she wanted to deal with interpersonal aspects related to the pandemic, but what is happening in Ukraine has also influenced her sculptures. “The daily news of flight and war controls my hands in a completely different way than originally intended. They are encounters with fates that we did not want to imagine.” By modeling people on the run, she can understand the situation better in a literal sense. Her studio guest Bjarne Geiges also uses his camera to deal with the subject of encounters. Various black and white variations can be found on his small-format photographs – from the familiar to conflict and self-reflection.
The studio of Ottilie Gaigl and her partner Günter Zozmann is also in Markt Schwaben. He captures snapshots with the camera and supplements them with media reports, song lyrics or his own texts. “Then I try to implement the essence of it in my work.” What Gaigl shows is oppressively topical – even though the experimental photographic work “Ruins” dates from 2014. The basis of the large-format work are alienated shots of dried plants. “At the time, I thought of archeological finds of an early settlement that had collapsed and were buried in the desert. Now they reminded me of the devastated cities in Ukraine.”
Trio in Parsdorf: The large paintings are by Ulrike Pfeiffer, along with fragile ceramic vessels by Claudia Sach and foam works by Christine Rath.
(Photo: Peter Hinz-Rosin)
We continue to Parsdorf. There, Ulrike Pfeiffer invited two former fellow students, Christine Rath and Claudia Sack, to her newly renovated rooms. The three deliberately do not present their works separately from each other. The viewer is asked to create connections between the images, clay objects and reliefs, to discover similarities and differences.
There are also all sorts of unexpected things in the town hall of Anzing. Because there you will not only find ceramics and excerpts from Siegfried Horst’s sketchbooks with portraits, landscapes, surreal scenes and animals. But also mysterious messages that Norbert Haberkorn captured on camera along the S-Bahn line from Poing to Munich. His photo-sociological project “S2_Life in Transit” has been running since 2008, a series of photos devoted to graffiti based on George Orwell’s novel “1984”. The current sequel to this includes seven new pieces, discovered while driving, by “watching closely or by accident”.
Siegfried Horst combines ceramics and painting in the Anzing town hall.
(Photo: Peter Hinz-Rosin)
Peter Böhm also brings both – an active look and chance – to the town hall. His “show” includes finds from the street, old cigarette boxes as well as tin cans that have been run over, but also “scribble” pictures, the origin of which is the “Vulc Art” invented by Böhm. About 22 years ago, the trained carpenter discovered in a rubber factory that a kind of woodcut could be made from the surplus products from production. Böhm presents his art made of waste, a plea against the throwaway society, and many suggestions for becoming active themselves to the school classes who have announced that they will be there on Monday, but the door will be open to all interested parties. Johannes Mayrhofer is also looking forward to this. The painter, illustrator and lecturer has set out to show experiments with shadows, using graphic means on paper. So he wants to give suggestions to try out.
The confrontation with the viewer also costs some artists an effort
Since the Plastics Group first appeared in 2013, its composition has changed slightly due to a few changes. However, it still consists of about a dozen creative people and is deliberately not going to get any bigger, but guest artists are always welcome. One particularly enjoys the opening of the studios, because that creates close proximity to the public. It still costs some to overcome. “If you leave your work alone in an exhibition, you can avoid the confrontation with the viewer,” explains Ottilie Gaigl. At the Plastics Days, however, she experienced mostly fruitful conversations – and this also encouraged her to think things through.
Nobody should be afraid to step over their threshold: Conni Propstmeier, Rosemarie Hingerl, Conny Boy and Inge Schmidt from Atelier Osterfeld in Poing.
(Photo: Peter Hinz-Rosin)
“It’s equally good for us to be able to communicate and philosophize about our work,” says Inge Schmidt. She emphasizes that the intention is not to produce a gallery atmosphere, but rather a workshop atmosphere, in order to take away their fears of the unknown “even for people who have nothing to do with art”. If that works, an encounter with the Barberinian faun, one of Schmidt’s favorite subjects, for which she has given an unusual setting this time, beckons in the Osterfeld studio. Flowers, gardens, meadows and nature are also waiting for Rosemarie Hingerl, who wants to “pass on a good feeling in these difficult times”. Conny Boy, on the other hand, was inspired by an “impressive TV report about Gerhard Richter”, while Cornelia Propstmeier presents a series of fantasy landscapes that she calls “Horizons”. They should also give the opportunity to dream of beautiful things or to find peace.
Conny Boy was recently inspired by Gerhard Richter’s paintings.
(Photo: Peter Hinz-Rosin)
Stefan Pillokat is the guest of the “Ladies in the Atelier in Osterfeld” this time. Markt Schwabener got involved with the topic “stone and wood” without a plan – and surprised themselves in the process. He only used completely unprocessed stones, “the way nature supplies them.” “What I carve out of the wood, I then arrange for the stone to fit in there, to find a seat, a home, a place. This bringing together is what excites me the most.”
Stefan Pillokat from Markt Schwaben creates a place for the stone.
(Photo: Peter Hinz-Rosin)
The Kunststoff group has accomplished a lot in the past decade: every year a brochure for the open studios as a collector’s item (some of them are even out of print), a shop window show during the lockdown, an online gallery with changing artists. But the most important thing for everyone involved are the often original and touching encounters with up to 600 visitors. Even if, unlike an artist friend and regular guest named Roland Dittel, they show up without a home-made gift.
“Plastic”: Saturday, May 21 and Sunday, May 22, 2 p.m. to 7 p.m. Monday, May 23, Anzing town hall only, 8 a.m. to 12.30 p.m. Information about the contributors and their locations can be found in the current brochure.