A conversation with Klaus Dobler

 

We visited Klaus Dobler’s atelier in Neukölln to get to know him and understand his work. 

 

G: When I saw your work, I realized quite fast that you re-organize, in a way. You take elements of what already is, and make something new out of it. 

 

K: I often get the feedback from people that they find faces or eyes in the chaos, similar to what happens when one looks at clouds.

 

He then shows us a 6 x 5,70 m collage that was exhibited at a church. 

 

K: It is fully abstract, but a lot of people saw faces here.

 

G: What I see is a modern abstraction of a scene of ascension, maybe Maria’s or Jesus‘. I can see a halo here, and this shape looks like angels or clouds… 

But what I also realize, is that possibly there’s an obsessive element in your art. I see patterns everywhere, the same images, the same snippet over and over again…

 

K: The identical, or redundant… For example, for this one picture, I used 500 issues of a LIDL advertising magazine, which means that the same image comes up about 500 times.  

 

G: How do you feel when working so closely with such big quantities of massively produced material? How do you approach the subject?

 

K: Everything started when I was young. I was in a band, had little money, and my brother was working for a poster company in southern Germany. He sent me prints for me to sell at the flea market, and they were beautiful, but it wasn’t easy for me to sell them… I had to hang them up, sometimes they would break, so eventually they just started to pile up;  so I wondered what I should do with them. 

 

G: The question then becomes what to do with all that which has been produced. So you decided to transform them into something new. 

 

K: It’s somewhat of a primitive alchemy, I cut them up, examine them, the colors, shapes… mix everything up as if I were using test tubes, and see what comes out.

 

G: In your work we can see emotional complexity as well. I see  emotional contrasts: Tranquility but also a frantic search.

 

K: It really feels like the ultimate freedom. Some times I’d drive down to visit my brother and come back with hundreds of posters of one sort. Now I have a new source, and I can get for example a thousand posters from an old theater play. And when I can get my hands on new material, I feel giddy and excited, like „what wonderful reds!“ And the finished product is always different from what I imagined in my head. When I start cutting them up, it becomes a huge chaos. The more I cut and divide them, the piles of snippets multiply.

 

G: What kind of posters do you like to work with the most? Are the graphics irrelevant?

 

K: Posters that feature clouds are great. The first collages were clouds. I once wanted to read my poetry at this café called „Wolkenbügel“ (eng. cloud hangers: taken from El Lissitzky’s concept of a horizontal skyscraper). I thought because the word „cloud“ is in the name, maybe I can get them to let me present my texts if I give them pictures of clouds. I used to draw a lot at the time, but I realized I couldn’t picture the clouds like I wanted to, so I thought: There are clouds pictured everywhere already! And I started to cut them up from existing prints.

 

G: So you felt more comfortable taking something that already was a finished product instead of starting from zero.

 

K: It isn’t necessary to start from zero. Why should I draw clouds if there are already so many beautiful ones? If I have so many of them, why not use them?

 

Klaus then proceeds to show us his collection of raw material. Some posters, he says, have been there for years. The kind of paper is also relevant: Some of them are raw on one side, glossy on the other, sometimes harder, or heavier. We can also see what seems like a poster of poker cards, each card next to the other. We find out they’re actually from a print factory, yet uncut into cards. Furthermore, we also find a finished collage that features fruits.

 

G: I also get the feeling that synesthesia might be an important element as well. When I look at this, a certain sound come to mind. It’s an organic sound, like insects in a cluster, or animals eating. And it adds to the work, whether it’s planned or not. 

 

K:  It’s music, really. It’s like a music sheet. When I did this, I thought of an abstract heart valve. Maybe the heart of the universe.

 

(…)

 

K: The pictures often have stories attached to them. For ten years, I organized concerts and exhibitions for a church. They printed these magazines, of which about half were thrown away because no one read them- and I used the front covers for my collages. 

 

G: Are you religious?

 

K: I metaphysized myself as Christian. In other words, one is born, and it just happens that one is part of a religion.

 

G: And you worked for a church too, you’ve exhibited there. Are you inspired by religion?

 

K: I come from an episcopal city. And I was a church acolyte for a long time when I was young. That was also an introduction to posters: I had to ride my bike to church for the early service, and near the church was a posting from the cinema with movie posters. And they always threw the old posters in the bin next to it.  So I started asking if I could take them instead.

 

G: That is interesting to me. On the one hand, you have very playful manner to go about your materials, and yet there appears to be a need for transcendence…  Maybe you question what the value of these images are, if it lies in the picture itself, or the novelty. It’s an object that has taken time and effort to create and that people use; images that catch people’s attention and are representative of something which has value, whether it’s a movie or just a product- then, it lands in the trash.

 

K: Those films were watched by hundreds of thousands of people. The LIDL brochures, they were printed about one point six million times. One point six million people have seen what I see when I hold one of those flyers. That amount of people- a collage in its own right. They’re all different, but inside, they’re the same. 

We’ve all seen the same. What happens inside our heads?

 

A conversation with Klaus Dobler

 

We visited Klaus Dobler’s atelier in Neukölln to get to know him and understand his work. 

 

G: When I saw your work, I realized quite fast that you re-organize, in a way. You take elements of what already is, and make something new out of it. 

 

K: I often get the feedback from people that they find faces or eyes in the chaos, similar to what happens when one looks at clouds.

 

He then shows us a 6 x 5,70 m collage that was exhibited at a church. 

 

K: It is fully abstract, but a lot of people saw faces here.

 

G: What I see is a modern abstraction of a scene of ascension, maybe Maria’s or Jesus‘. I can see a halo here, and this shape looks like angels or clouds… 

But what I also realize, is that possibly there’s an obsessive element in your art. I see patterns everywhere, the same images, the same snippet over and over again…

 

K: The identical, or redundant… For example, for this one picture, I used 500 issues of a LIDL advertising magazine, which means that the same image comes up about 500 times.  

 

G: How do you feel when working so closely with such big quantities of massively produced material? How do you approach the subject?

 

K: Everything started when I was young. I was in a band, had little money, and my brother was working for a poster company in southern Germany. He sent me prints for me to sell at the flea market, and they were beautiful, but it wasn’t easy for me to sell them… I had to hang them up, sometimes they would break, so eventually they just started to pile up;  so I wondered what I should do with them. 

 

G: The question then becomes what to do with all that which has been produced. So you decided to transform them into something new. 

 

K: It’s somewhat of a primitive alchemy, I cut them up, examine them, the colors, shapes… mix everything up as if I were using test tubes, and see what comes out.

 

G: In your work we can see emotional complexity as well. I see  emotional contrasts: Tranquility but also a frantic search.

 

K: It really feels like the ultimate freedom. Some times I’d drive down to visit my brother and come back with hundreds of posters of one sort. Now I have a new source, and I can get for example a thousand posters from an old theater play. And when I can get my hands on new material, I feel giddy and excited, like „what wonderful reds!“ And the finished product is always different from what I imagined in my head. When I start cutting them up, it becomes a huge chaos. The more I cut and divide them, the piles of snippets multiply.

 

G: What kind of posters do you like to work with the most? Are the graphics irrelevant?

 

K: Posters that feature clouds are great. The first collages were clouds. I once wanted to read my poetry at this café called „Wolkenbügel“ (eng. cloud hangers: taken from El Lissitzky’s concept of a horizontal skyscraper). I thought because the word „cloud“ is in the name, maybe I can get them to let me present my texts if I give them pictures of clouds. I used to draw a lot at the time, but I realized I couldn’t picture the clouds like I wanted to, so I thought: There are clouds pictured everywhere already! And I started to cut them up from existing prints.

 

G: So you felt more comfortable taking something that already was a finished product instead of starting from zero.

 

K: It isn’t necessary to start from zero. Why should I draw clouds if there are already so many beautiful ones? If I have so many of them, why not use them?

 

Klaus then proceeds to show us his collection of raw material. Some posters, he says, have been there for years. The kind of paper is also relevant: Some of them are raw on one side, glossy on the other, sometimes harder, or heavier. We can also see what seems like a poster of poker cards, each card next to the other. We find out they’re actually from a print factory, yet uncut into cards. Furthermore, we also find a finished collage that features fruits.

 

G: I also get the feeling that synesthesia might be an important element as well. When I look at this, a certain sound come to mind. It’s an organic sound, like insects in a cluster, or animals eating. And it adds to the work, whether it’s planned or not. 

 

K:  It’s music, really. It’s like a music sheet. When I did this, I thought of an abstract heart valve. Maybe the heart of the universe.

 

(…)

 

K: The pictures often have stories attached to them. For ten years, I organized concerts and exhibitions for a church. They printed these magazines, of which about half were thrown away because no one read them- and I used the front covers for my collages. 

 

G: Are you religious?

 

K: I metaphysized myself as Christian. In other words, one is born, and it just happens that one is part of a religion.

 

G: And you worked for a church too, you’ve exhibited there. Are you inspired by religion?

 

K: I come from an episcopal city. And I was a church acolyte for a long time when I was young. That was also an introduction to posters: I had to ride my bike to church for the early service, and near the church was a posting from the cinema with movie posters. And they always threw the old posters in the bin next to it.  So I started asking if I could take them instead.

 

G: That is interesting to me. On the one hand, you have very playful manner to go about your materials, and yet there appears to be a need for transcendence…  Maybe you question what the value of these images are, if it lies in the picture itself, or the novelty. It’s an object that has taken time and effort to create and that people use; images that catch people’s attention and are representative of something which has value, whether it’s a movie or just a product- then, it lands in the trash.

 

K: Those films were watched by hundreds of thousands of people. The LIDL brochures, they were printed about one point six million times. One point six million people have seen what I see when I hold one of those flyers. That amount of people- a collage in its own right. They’re all different, but inside, they’re the same. We’ve all seen the same. What happens inside our heads?