Natural, Insane, Abstract

"Only a short time span separated peaceful ecstasy from blood frenzy, let gentleness tip over into derangement. A few days before that drug-enhanced Flower Power happening in Woodstock, a different sort of flower children in the name of their self-proclaimed redeemer Charles Manson committed a ritual massacre claiming seven lives on America’s West Coast. Love and religious fanaticism, spirituality and black magic, the dissolution of the world’s boundaries and its very destruction converged in a disconcerting manner during those August days of 1969, casting a dark shadow on a superficially sunny epoch of the 20th century. The period’s contradictory perspectives provide a starting point for Hansjoerg Dobliar’s exhibition „Natural, Insane, Abstract Art” shown at the Munich „Tanzschule” in autumn 2008 and featuring Sharon Tate, Swinging Sixties Hollywood actress and tragic murder victim of the Manson sect, as a symbolic incarnation of an age of extreme wishes, misapprehensions, myths and traumas. Dobliar’s „Natural, Insane, Abstract Art” is dominated by an elongated, black stage podium above which the exhibits appear to float in front of an also black curtain wall: three head-high image panels on concavely curved wooden boards, as well as smaller works in an also curved shelving element. Further small images are hung on one of the side walls, while a free-standing sculpture assembled from concave surfaces provides an eccentric counterpoint within the space. Only dimly lit, partly by fluorescent tubes laid out on the floor, the entire scenario has a nocturnal feel to it and exudes the cool pathos of a chapel of rest...."

By Bernhart Schwenk



Delicate Deformations

"...Since 2005 Dobliar has been creating several groups of collages with the help of a unique procedure he developed. It involves reproductions taken from illustrated papers and magazines, not infrequently of an older provenience, whose nature and contents suit his intentions. The formats of these magazines hence virtually determine the measurements of the final pieces, with the artist occasionally opting for double-page spreads, joined up in a landscape format. But his "collage" process as such only rarely involves any actual gluing down of cut out materials on the reproductions selected. Instead Hansjoerg Dobliar mostly resorts to gouache, acrylic and gloss for overpainting and transforming the printed black and white or colour images. In some cases this can take the shape of selective interventions, for example in the pieces where a sprayed surface obscures a person′s face, or parts of his or her body, leaving the original motif recognizable. But in most instances his interventions with acrylic or gloss change the overall picture so extensively that a completely new, unexpected image content is revealed...."

By Zdenek Felix