MANTRAILING
2023
Galerie Rainer Gröschl
KielOffermann's work can be viewed as being akin to dialectic of romanticism, the fear of chaos lurking behind the ordered systems. This chaos can be an accident, human intervention or a major force of nature. The resulting imagery is both cold and pathetic, distanced and nostalgic. They are often situations of absence, empty scenes of an event that has already or not yet occurred. Atmospheres of intangible uncertainty and the unreliability of perception are of central importance to Offermann's work. The figures depicted stand in contradiction to an impassive environment in which they wander around and get lost. This can be both a passive process and an active transition from one world to another. In both cases, the movement is circular and ultimately leads back to the starting point. The compositions are created in a collage of memories, archive images and filmic tropes. Whether it is fiction, documentation or hallucination cannot be determined.