Mantz at Friedl

Via the Chicago Reader, German artist Gerhard Mantz's landscape animations are on display at Oskar Friedl, 300 West Superior.


Vorubergehende Unsterblichkeit

From Fred Camper's synopsis:

Though Gerhard Mantz's ten computer-generated landscapes at Oskar Friedl have the texture of digital creations, their designs are atypically and admirably sparse. Taking 19th-century landscape painting as his primary model, Mantz produces works that suggest the changed nature of Romantic aspirations in the digital age: Caspar David Friedrich's landscape paintings imbue his locales with magic; Mantz's repetitive surfaces are just as mysteriously subjective. The strangely melancholy beauty of these places can't be traversed--we're hopelessly distanced from nature.