Galleri Urbane is pleased to announce Lockerungsübung, a solo exhibition of the latest works by Berlin-based artist Marlon Wobst. This represents the artist’s first solo exhibition at Galleri Urbane.

Wobst’s world is full of small, impossible moments and gestures that double as jokes. There is a quiet joie de vivre here—a generosity of feeling that allows imperfection to remain visible. In Wobst’s work, joy is not an effect but a way of paying attention. Light-heartedness, ultimately, is ethical.

(Eve Hill-Agnus)

An essay by Eve Hill-Agnus accompanies this text.

Bodies fill Marlon Wobst’s work. They swim, sunbathe, tumble, strain, recover, lounge; they stack and entangle, bend forward and backward, touch their toes. They are unmistakably of our world, yet somehow absorbed in their own.

In one felted work, a multi-hued tangle of figures forms a buoyant melee, a joyous muddle that effervescently defies gravity—as if togetherness itself were enough to lift them. Elsewhere, a nude diver slips headfirst into an expanse of blue; only pink feet remain above the water’s surface, briefly marking the point of departure. The plunge is underway, whether we follow it or not.

Wobst’s figures are wobbly, imperfect, resolutely unheroic. Their awkwardness carries a kind of humility. Skin tones slide across improbable registers, a colorist’s pleasure that reads as affection more than any stylization, intuitive and unburdened by correctness. In ceramic works, a man might stroke a cat; another paint an elephant on his own belly. These gestures feel playful and, while minor, far from empty. They read like pieces of the paintings that have wandered off—modest, tactile, and quietly amused.