During art school, watching people constructing artificial problems to solve them afterwards, I realized that my basic problem is that I don’t really have a real problem. Wherever I go, somebody has been there before. Everything is said-just not by everybody.
Ulrich Lamsfuss, 2013

Ulrich Lamsfuss will open Escape Escapism, the artist’s fourth solo exhibition at Lombard Freid, continuing his explorations of image, identity, and global media culture. Inundated by images from social media, blogs, and advertising, Lamsfuss turns artistic production on its head, appropriating visual material as a record of his own consumption. Sifting through high art, magazines, and stock photo databases, Lamsfuss reproduces commercial images as his own, meticulously documenting the act of looking. Having studied at the Dusseldorf Academy of Fine Arts under Georg Baselitz, Lamsfuss is part of a successful generation of artists uprooting our assumptions about the intersections of visual culture, fine art, and commerce.

For Escape Escapism-titled after an early ‘90s graffito from Rainald Götz’s blog-turned-novel Rubbish for Everybody-Lamsfuss will present recent paintings and sculptures, depicting a variety of subjects. Drawing from a wide range of source materials, Lamsfuss extends his engagement with momentary images over weeks with each painting. He will often make successive copies of a single painting, further duplicating his process. Ryan McVay, Vase Shattering (gty. im. #200436912001), Nos. 1, 2, and 3 (2012) takes on a subject whose instantaneous nature makes it inherently impossible to paint from life, elusive to the naked eye. Lamsfuss’s reproductions gain their potency through his manipulation of time and scale, transforming fleeting moments into weeks of painting. Lamsfuss titles each work after its original author and context, emphasizing the arbitrary nature of images and the archival impulses in his practice.

Lamsfuss’s paintings are uncanny and hyperreal, forcing the viewer to discern between original & reproduction, physical & digital, and art & advertising in an increasingly slippery world. His subjects also ask us to confront the cultural contexts of their sources, whether German national histories, the artistic tradition of still-life painting, or genetically modified foods. Lamsfuss’s paintings straddle the personal and the political, emphasizing the malleability of images in the public sphere. Accompanying his recent paintings, Lamsfuss will also present bronze- and gold-cast sculptures of his studio trash bins, literally transforming his rubbish into fine art.

Ulrich Lamsfuss (b. 1971, Bonn, Germany) currently lives and works in Berlin. His work has been exhibited across Europe, including recent shows at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin and the Sprengel Museum, Hannover.