Mathias Hornung Defragmentology

Anna Laudel Düsseldorf is showing "Defragmentology" by the German artist Mathias Hornung from
23 January 2020. His works dissolve the boundary between graphics and sculpture. They are
sensual and at the same time conceptual images that play with the space and interspace between
media and materials. They are based on rectangular grids printed either on paper or threedimensionally on wood. Topography as well as time and space play an important role in his works, but the ultimate idea behind his works is the break from the perfect, even and regular web of life.

In Mathias Hornung's woodblock prints, past, present, and future enter into an idiosyncratic,
oscillating relationship. Seemingly incompatible elements combine to form new spaces of thought
and vision that create and carry out ambivalences. In his new series "Defragmentology", which
collects colored woodcuts under the title “Digitalmelt”, he draws a bow from the woodcut into the
digital world and situates his images thematically and structurally in the confusing present: his
media survey is thus at the same time a kind of ancestor research that questions the multilayered,
also incalculable dimensions of dealing with information in an irritating way. Wood, paper and
computers mark different epochs, which reciprocally expand into new possibilities, commonalities
and points of view, each illuminating itself anew. Wooden prints can also be more than a
reminiscence of the past. Hornung's group of works "Defragmentology" places an old technique in
a fruitful relationship to our media present. In a world of ever more perfect technical images, the
medial flood of images, he links their codes with the old process of high pressure with his direct
manual access to sensual immediacy, to corporeality and haptics.

Mathias Hornung lives and works in Berlin and has already exhibited internationally in Canada,
South Africa and Austria.

Contents of the press release were taken from Mathias Hornung's catalogue. It was written by Dr.
Dorothée Bauerle-Willert.