Rolf Graf - Unruh

The work of Rolf Graf (Heiden / Switzerland 1969 -) is steeped in folk memories, traditional culture and popular imagery. But here, no staging or aestheticizing nostalgia of childhood, rather, a meticulous job of distanciation that results, under a false air of improvisation, in completely original narratives. And that is what interests the artist whose work oscillates between folk tales and legends and the brutal banality of today’s post-industrial world. Collected, recycled, stripped of their use, but still displaying a function, objects gain a new intensity (density) that leads the viewer on the path of introspection. In the act of burning or melting, Rolf Graf’s graphical works incorporate the temporal process of creation into the material itself, literally distorting the support and revealing the original incident. In his Berlin exile, he develops a return to memories, traditions and allegorical images, backed by fragile semantic structures and the ethnographic watermark that crosses his entire artistic process.