Gert & Uwe Tobias, Exhibition Poster, Woodcut, CFA Berlin, 2010. All images via Contemporary Fine Arts Berlin.

Currently on view at Contemporary Fine Arts Berlin is “Neue Arbeiten,” an exhibition of recent work by fraternal collaborative Gert & Uwe Tobias (b. 1973). The show features over fifty pieces by the Romanian-born twins, including ceramic sculpture, drawings, collages, and the colorful, large-scale woodcuts for which they are best known. Their interdisciplinary practice incorporates folkloric imagery, regional iconography, and popular culture, creating a self-referrential, multimedia visual narrative. Like all of their previous exhibitions, they designed a site-specific woodcut poster for the CFA show, which comments upon and participates in the body of work on view.

Gert and Uwe Tobias, Ohne Titel (Untitled), Woodcut, CFA Berlin, 2010.

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Rachel Whiteread, Stairs, 1995

Leading contemporary artist Rachel Whiteread is best known for her sculpture, which almost exclusively springs from the premise of capturing the negative space in and around architectural structures. Now for the first time a museum has ventured to shed some light on her relatively neglected drawings, in a retrospective display at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Perhaps previously overlooked as preliminaries to a final sculptural piece, or just obscured by the monumentality of her public works, it is an interesting choice, and a critical one, in order to assert the importance of this ignored portion of an artist’s oeuvre. Whiteread herself affirms the personal import of these works when she described them thus: “My drawings are a diary of my work.” [Press Release] In the press release this metaphor is aptly extended as they describe how “like the passages in a diary her drawings range from fleeting ideas to labored reflections.”

Rachel Whiteread, Vitrine Objects

More text and images after the jump…
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