Texts: 2022

Artist Statement

Christopher Gerberding is an artist and curator. 

He grew up in Paris and studied for one year at the Academy Julian until he moved to Germany. After his studies in fine arts at the HBK Braunschweig and the Villa Arson Nizza, he graduated in 2020 in the class of Prof.Frances Scholz. He is the Founder and Curator of the temporary Room. Currently, he lives and works in Cologne, Germany.

His artistic work mainly deals with romantic characteristics such as longing, invisibility, and projections of fantasies, fears, or consolation. Just like in painting, the landscape is the surface of the projection. It belongs to those who look. The act of contemplation presupposes the acceptance of the feeling of being lost. To wander in your own psyche, you have to accept to forego the familiar to get involved in the unknown and that without any guarantee.

It is about the search and the poker of the Loss. He is not concerned with the abyss or the infinite that you are looking at, but the feeling of looking at it.

Through dark, pathless forests, too landless seas along a blind road, the viewer still seems to be after something, like a ship slowly drifting into the night. Where you come from does not matter more than where you go: the transition from the unknown to the unexpected is the only relevant term for the painter, who delights with apprehensive patience. In a seemingly endless night, light is scarce and far away, yet bright.

An uncertain purpose, it must be decided whether it is an instant lightning bolt or the sun of a new dawn, and those who choose the latter commit an act of faith.

Gerberding's drive is about faith and dreams, about the longing for meaning and the state of nothingness. He is interested in the bizarre thrill that slumbers in the still waters of contemplation. From this struggle emerges the essence of his work.