“Pretty Vacant XXVI”, Georg Bothe (DE)

About artist:

Georg Bothe is a German artist based in Berlin. He uses both cardboard and color etching in his works. His abstract prints are made up of a combination of several colours and details, encouraging the observer to look further at them. For these particular prints, he used Tetra-Paks as a printing plate. This is a cardboard covered in aluminium and plastic, a material used for milk cartons. The folding of the milk carton is still seen on the printed surface in the works. The fragility of the Tetra-Park material allows for only a few god prints.

Bothe’s rewarding work results in abstract etchings with a certain softness in their structure. Some of these coloured line-based shapes seem biological, reminding us of nature. Bothe plays with transparency and a light that seems to emanate from the work itself. He appeals to our joy for colours and structures without defining the space.

He uses his prints to create impressions of nature through colored objects and forms, turning objects into forms. He focuses mainly on colour in his works, colour which he states “possesses both a space-creating and atmospheric value” (2019).

“Color, as one of the fundamental categories of optical perception, allows the fixation of sensation values, which in and of themselves are as significant as those caused by lines or surfaces. Color creates depth of space – that is, movement – like the line division of space (on a two-dimensional image carrier)” (Georg Bothe, 2019).