Art Agents Gallery Wilstorfer Straße 71, Fabrikhallen Phoenix 21073 Hamburg Germany (city map) Send E-mail tel +49-(0)40-899 75 51 www.artagents.de

The exhibition Imaginäre Realitäten leads to the border zone between reality and fiction, which, particularly today, exercises an ongoing fascination upon many artists. Artistic positions are introduced here which assume a deliberate distance from the nostalgic escapism of the reputed "new Romantic", as well as from the soigné "Leipziger" ennui of a media age without a utopia. Rather, the positions of these artists still grasp "Fiction and Illusion as a Productive Force", the subtitle of Jurgis Baltruaitis' book. Drawing, painting, photography, video, animation, installation – the most various media, often working parallel with each other, evoke differing levels of reality. References to history, for example to the epoch of the Romantic, always lead back to the present. The question of what possibilities are still open at all to artistic fantasy, in the midst of today's surplus of prefabricated medial realities, is also posed.

Images, recalling tree-trunks or branches, which John von Bergen (1971) meticulously bring to paper, are derived only partially from the observation of real objects. Concrete associations, for example with genetically cloned material, linger on, as the suggestive transformation of the material results for the most part through the sketching of the drawing itself.

Julia Oschatz (1970) deals at various levels with the projection of human feelings on to nature. A being with an animal's head and a human body shows up in different natural surroundings, which Oschatz lets appear in paintings, drawings or videos, in which she combines animation with real film. The result is a condensed area for projections, where everything that could feed the clichéd image of the Romantic is available.

Michael Kunze's (1961) detailed paintings combine different eras and spaces in a complex pictorial imagination, where, as in an echo chamber, various epochs of art history appear, as well as elements of different computer games.

Lina Kim (1965) manufactures stage-like scenarios, where everyday things tip over, landing in a surreal universe. Like Jean Cocteau or René Magritte, the mirror is the symbol for the transition into another reality, as a border between the psychic and physical space, through which the reflecting projections indissolubly fall into each other.

For Nedko Solakov (1957), the style of the fantastic also serves as subtle criticism of social attitudes and habits. In the "Romantic Landscape with Missing Parts", Solakov takes apart the stereotypical pattern of perception of nature in the true sense of the word, which one often doesn't see at first glance.