Piotr Nathan

Piotr Nathan Sobieralski was born in the Polish city of Gdansk and later moved with his family to Hamburg, where his father had found work. He remained in Hamburg and enrolled in a course of studies at the Hochschule für bildende Kunst. Thus he became a voluntary exile whose experience bore the imprint of travel and translation, of "virtual transposability". The process of translating from one medium to another became an obsession with Nathan. His art, which is extensively documented in this volume, is characterised by a ceaseless process of interplay in which equal value and weight is placed on each side. Thus, for example, the sight of objects suspended freely from threads in space evokes the impression that their functional value and context are also held in suspension. One frequently recurring element in Nathan's art is the silhouette, whose material character is alternately augmented or diminished as it oscillates between positive and negative. Nathan's works relate to ideas of life and death, questioning their conceptual content and thus compelling the viewer to reassess his own matrix of associations.