We visited Klaus Dobler's atelier in Neukölln to get to know him and understand his work. 

 

G: When I saw your work, I realized quite fast that you re-organize, in a way. You take elements of what already is, and make something new out of it. 

 

K: I often get the feedback from people that they find faces or eyes in the chaos, similar to what happens when one looks at clouds.

 

He then shows us a 6 x 5,70 m collage that was exhibited at a church. 

 

K: It is fully abstract, but a lot of people saw faces here.

 

G: What I see is a modern abstraction of a scene of ascension, maybe Maria's or Jesus'. I can see a halo here, and this shape looks like angels or clouds... 

But what I also realize, is that possibly there's an obsessive element in your art. I see patterns everywhere, the same images, the same snippet over and over again...

 

K: The identical, or redundant... For example, for this one picture, I used 500 issues of a LIDL advertising magazine, which means that the same image comes up about 500 times.  

 

G: How do you feel when working so closely with such big quantities of massively produced material? How do you approach the subject?

 

K: Everything started when I was young. I was in a band, had little money, and my brother was working for a poster company in southern Germany. He sent me prints for me to sell at the flea market, and they were beautiful, but it wasn't easy for me to sell them... I had to hang them up, sometimes they would break, so eventually they just started to pile up;  so I wondered what I should do with them. 

 

G: The question then becomes what to do with all that which has been produced. So you decided to transform them into something new. 

 

K: It's somewhat of a primitive alchemy, I cut them up, examine them, the colors, shapes... mix everything up as if I were using test tubes, and see what comes out.

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