Matthias Bitzer

In a revisionist reassessment of classic modernism, Matthias Bitzer (b. Stuttgart, 1975; lives and works in Berlin) combines portraiture with geometric construction, often drawing on the formal vocabulary, plots, and intellectual history of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His work in media such as painting, sculpture, drawing, collage, and site-specific installation art speaks a characteristic symbolic language. Interweaving the lives of prominent figures like Arthur Schnitzler, Emily Dickinson, Fernando Pessoa, Jorge Luis Borges, Anita Berber, and Leopoldo Fregoli with his own biographical experience and contemporary life, Bitzer creates dense narrative fabrics that accommodate the viewer’s abstract-figurative associations. The book documents the evolution of Bitzer’s conceptions of time-space through four of his most representative solo exhibitions to date. Individual catalogue sections illustrate the shows "Anatol Echo" at Almine Rech, Paris, "Amherst/Ether/Fields" at Francesca Minini, Milan, "Saturnine Swing" at Marianne Boesky, New York, and "The Collapse of Features" at KadelWillborn, Düsseldorf. Essays by Roland Nachtigäller, Timotheus Vermeulen, Ursula Ströbele, and Augusta Gordon Joyce as well as sketches, photographs, poems, and references compiled by the artist round out this survey of Matthias Bitzer’s extensive œuvre.