Gert and Uwe Tobias' publication to accompany their 2004 exhibition is in many ways a primer on the Tobias brothers themselves, and from the cover it might pass for a children's book. On the very first page we are greeted by two owls, posed symmetrically, facing each other. Turning the pages, there are mostly images: colorful woodcuts; whimsical typewriter drawings; photographs of moody mountains and forests, an ominous lake, the tower of a dark castle; lists of vampire movies; decorative patterns from textiles and architecture; skulls and carnival masks; children and animals?a white horse, a goat, birds, sheep being herded through deep snow. The book has no text except for the briefest of captions; it is as if for the Tobias brothers the world they are coming from must retain all its strangeness as a purely visual realm. The title suggests as much. A mystery is no longer a mystery once it's been solved.
Romanian twin brothers Gert and Uwe Tobias create large-scale woodcuts and sculptural constructions. They use the dark mythologies and history of their native Transylvania as their subject, bringing age-old folktales and imagery into the realm of the present. The prints and sculptures make reference not only to skulls and monsters, but also to modern graphic design, ancient ceramic forms, camp Hollywood horror films, and abstract imagery. The artists? multi-media installations explore the way in which legends are formed and how objects stimulate cultural memory.
Dimensions: 9.5" x 11" (inches) Pages: 64 Edition: Hardcover Languages: English ISBN: 3936859310
