Gabriel vormstein biography

Gabriel Vormstein focuses on the theme of transience, futility, and temporality with his distinctive and acute visual language.
Gabriel Vormstein has been focusing on the theme of transience, futility, and temporality with his distinctive and acute visual language.
Born in 1974 in Konstanz, Germany, Gabriel Vormstein studied at the Staatlichen Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Karlsruhe from 1995-2001.

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The title of the exhibition Tempus fungit – amor mannet is a play on the Latin “Tempus fugit, amor manet” or “time flies, love waits.” Vormstein adds the “n” to further stress themes of decomposition and languid mannerism. This serves as a perfect illustration of Vormstein’s work, made with inherently decaying materials like newspaper, branches, and dried flowers, coupled with lovingly rendered imagery to form a narrative of beauty, affect, and desire.

The public facade of the gallery, our “on the wall” project space, will feature a large, white newspaper collage reminiscent of an aging wall or book cover. By highlighting the facade as the cover of a book, the gallery’s interior architecture becomes a blank page on which set the lyrical story that unfolds within, each artwork a protagonist in the narrative. Whether quoting Egon Schiele figures, Van Gogh’s expressionism, or modernist abstraction, the work here is predominantly painted in muted black, grey, and white, often interrupted with

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Selected Solo Exhibitions

2018

Gabriel Vormstein: 100 Jahre tot, Meyer Riegger, Berlin, Germany, Berlin

2014

Gabriel Vormstein: Papyrus containing the spell to preserve it´s possessor II, Meyer Riegger, Berlin, Germany, Berlin

2013

Gabriel Vormstein: Tempus fungit – amor mannet, Monique Meloche, USA, West Town

2011

Gabriel Vormstein: Catch as Catch Can, Almine Rech Gallery, Paris, France, 3e

Gabriel Vormstein: Cornament & Rime, Patricia Low Contemporary, Gstaad, Switzerland, Gstaad

2010

Gabriel Vormstein: Baby Abc, Casey Kaplan, USA, Chelsea

2009

Gabriel Vormstein Papyrus Containing The Spell To Preserve Its Possessor, Meyer Riegger, Karlsruhe, Germany, Karlsruhe

Selected Group Exhibitions

2017

U Scope I'm God Say Hi Or Be John, Galerie Art Attitude Herve Bize, France, Nancy

And Then There Were None, Meyer Riegger, Karlsruhe, Germany, Karlsruhe

2016

Hermann tritt schüchtern herein, Meyer Riegger, Berlin, Germany, Berlin

Stefan Kaminski and Gabriel Vormstein

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Gabriel Vormstein

In a startlingly literal attempt to connect his works and anchor them to their context, Gabriel Vormstein, in his recent New York debut at Casey Kaplan, went so far as to bind his delicate paintings together with wire and dot the gallery floor with rocks. With just a handful of exhibition appearances to his name, the young Berlin-based artist is sufficiently inexperienced that the gesture might have signaled a lack of confidence were it not consistent with a lyrical aesthetic informed by a web of cultural references, chief among them the material experiments of arte povera.

In giving this show the convoluted title “Seems to B: Soddisfaction, Incomplection, Putrefaction,” Vormstein alluded to a kind of creative posthistory in which the work of art marks not the conclusion but only the beginning. Just as arte povera rescued the spare and the perishable for art, Vormstein, too, revels in the inevitability of decay: He constructs awkward sculptures from tree branches and electrical tape and makes paintings on unprimed sheets of newspaper. (That the