The work of Jakob Roepke seems to inhabit one room. Granted, it is a room of endless possibilities, where patterns layer on top of patterns, and fish can fly, and dinosaurs are pets. Each work is populated by an everyman, sometimes two, in subdued casual office clothes. He never seems surprised bye the weirdness he finds himself in, each work is a new, twisted situation through which he saunters with relative ease, or labors in oblivious to the implications. Roepke is a German artist, whose body of work is an endless re-creation of this basic format with paint and collage.
The works are a bit surreal, but colorful and playful. While they are limited in scope, when viewed as an overall group one can't help but admire the varration used. Limits force us to work in interesting ways, to look at something from more than one angle. Roepke's works are filled with a dedicated sense of nuance.
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Notes on Art, Design and Asia
Owen Houhoulis - New York City
Saadi Nikro: Jakob Roepke's Compact Collages, Berlin 2009 (non published)
JAKOB ROEPKE
July 24th - August 30th, 2008
FRED is delighted to announce a solo show this summer with German guest artist Jakob Roepke.
Roepke began producing his small collages in 1996 and has since created over 700 separate pieces. In this exhibition a total of 130 of these works, dating from 1999 to the present, have been arranged by the artist; While each collage is an individual work, his clusters, implying both short and longer narratives, build up networks of reoccurring motives, situations and themes.
In each collage Roepke continually reinvents scenes for his tiny protagonists, the figures of which are drawn from 19th century Jiu Jitsu and 1970s yoga handbooks. Isolated in seemingly lonely domestic spaces, he throws them into ever changing and unexpected situations as if each work were a piece of iconographic research. The quotidian is turned on its head as the figures ward off monstrous animals, wild geometric figures and strange alien forms. Drawing upon art history, popular culture and the surrealist tradition, each piece is left open to a wealth of contextual interpretations.
Jakob Roepke can be likened to a pseudo- medieval painter of miniatures depicting grand and horrific ideas on a miniature scale. Following the surrealist tradition of Max Ernst and Giorgio de Chirico his tiny collages seem to reference the uncertainty and adversity of 21th century life; yet while the scenes hover between hopelessness and destruction, Roepke's central figures always seem on the verge of tipping the fight in their favour.
Jakob Roepke lives and works in Berlin.
FRED London
Vyner Street's Fred [London] Ltd shows the work of Jakob Roepke, a master of collage who has been refining his skills since the '90s, producing over 700 pieces of work along the way. Delicately painted in gouache on cardboard, Roepke's miniatures depict scenes that hint at surreal mythologies and cataclysmic events; a giant bird claws at a fleeing man in one, while boulders orbit a seated figure in another. Notably small in size (they measure 12 x 10 cm), the collages can be viewed individually, but the recurring images hint at an interconnected narrative. Look out especially for the retro wallpaper painted with minute attention to detail, telling its own story of domestic décor.
Helen Holtom- Flavorpill
German artist Jakob Roepke is a master of the miniature. Since 1996, as well as making sculptural works, Ropeke has been creating an ongoing series of small, 13 x 12cm paintings on cardboard in which he depicts a range of tiny protagonists in strange, surrealist scenarios. One hundred and fifity works from this series will be on view at Fred London over the summer.
Since Roepke began work on this series of paintings over ten years ago he has made 700 separate pieces. In each one Roepke invents scenes for his cast of reappearing characters, throwing them into ever-changing and unexpected situations. The series, painted in gouache on cardboard, accumulatively bulids a maze or network of reoccurring and varying motifs, situations and topics that draw on art history, popular culture and the surrealist tradition.
Jakob Roepke was born in 1960 and educated at Offenbach and Edingburgh College of Art. He lives and works in Berlin, Germany.
Saatchi Gallery
Kafka vs Laura Ashley
Themes of mishap, endurance and anxiety recur in Jakob Roepke's surrealist collages. The artist comes from Germany and has, since 1996, created over 700 small works on cardboard, each of which is identically sized. There are an impressive 150 such works in this show. It's a stiff-collared, retro male world - circa 1920s by the look of things - characterised by all sorts of unlovely competitive behaviour, and a vaguely homoerotic mood. The background colours, though, are decoratively pretty, and usual gender stereotyping would suggest they signify an otherwise completely absent femininity. Whatever; the work looks very Kafka meets Laura Ashley, and is well worth a visit.
Neal Brown- The First Post