Thilo Droste + etsorD olihT. Over the years, a lot has accumulated in the shelves, boxes and other archival buildings of the studio.

There is discarded, but not thrown away, next to the big throws, light boxes and objects pile up, canvases are leaning softly and silently covered, and the drawers of the plan cupboard open with difficulty under the weight of the stored paper. “Retrospective conversion” is the factual title of Thilo Droste's exhibition which precisely outlines his intention of an inventory, a stocktaking, a cartography of the work done.

Armed only with a pencil, the material that we associate with the ephemeral and sketchy, the artist carries out this examination and thus bundles his works, which in their diversity often seem as if they had quite different authors, into a single wall drawing. The theme of self-reflection and self-interrogation, which permeates Thilo Droste's work like no other, is explicitly dealt with in the exhibition. In the exhibition "Retrospective conversion", a reflection takes place in a subtle way when, through the perceptible division of the (artist) identity into a past, a present and a future ego, the initial assumption of a solo exhibition is reconfigured. As we know, we understand most things only in retrospect, while the present keeps us in suspense and tomorrow wants to be considered. The paradox of self-intersecting time in our being and acting is finely woven into the lines of the drawing, which is both retrospective and new work.

Thursday, 12 December 2019, 19 h
Artist talk with Father Georg Maria Roers SJ
pastor of artists & art commissioner of the Archdiocese of Berlin