Ohne Titel (swarm), 2025
Watercolour on hardboard, wood, acrylic
200 x 120 cm

Ohne Titel (man and bird), 2025
Pencil on paper, glass, wood
22,5 x 15,5 cm

Courtesy the artist

Oscar Kargruber (b. 1999, Sulzrain, Germany) is currently studying sculpture at the Städelschule in Frankfurt. His practice spans drawing, painting, and sculpture. His visual worlds seek to capture a specific atmosphere, one that makes moments of the uncanny and the ambiguous perceptible through essential forms.

For And This is Us 2025, he has created a wooden sculpture staged with elements of abstract painting and drawing. The sculpture depicts a human figure, upright and striding forwards, emerging from a thicket, grasping plants in its hands. Its gaze seeks ours. The expression is ambiguous, enigmatic, the mouth slightly open. The sculpture seems to capture a frozen moment in time—a gesture halted in motion and held in wood. Yet in its unresolved tension, it resists definitive interpretation.

Kargruber describes his subjects as intuitive moments that emerge through drawing and from personal memories. In their symbolism and formal qualities, they reference works from art history, literature, and film. In his sculptures, he searches for a primal quality in form—for the strange, the manic, the authentic, and the passionate.

Karl Blossfeldt’s early modernist close-up photographs of plants serve as a visual source for Kargruber’s carved thicket. He is fascinated by the diversity and formal rigour of Blossfeldt’s magnifications, which produce a totemic and almost threatening kind of beauty. Kargruber translates these into aesthetic elements within his sculpture.

In his practice, Kargruber approaches, almost methodically, the depiction of atmospheric tipping points—moments when beauty threatens to turn into something uncanny, where the lines between good and evil, beauty and danger begin to blur. He seeks this sense of ambiguity. Is the figure under threat, reaching for the plants for support? Or is it itself a threat, hiding in the undergrowth, clutching the foliage with force?

His training as a master wood sculptor enables him to apply his virtuosic skill in carving delicate, intricate forms from solid blocks of wood. The wooden figure is spatially expanded by two wall pieces: an abstract painting made up of dotted colour points describing a spiral movement, and a small pencil drawing showing a figure in profile holding a seed between their lips, which a bird grasps with its beak. Kargruber sees these images as energy made material—gestural traces that make the field of force surrounding his figures perceptible.

Oscar Kargruber draws inspiration from sculptural traditions of both antiquity and modernity. The power of frontal representation found in Greek  and Egyptian sculpture, as well as in Etruscan art, resonates within his visual language. He is drawn to reduced forms that allow only the essential to remain. In his work, Kargruber is not interested in naturalistic depiction. His treatment of volume and anatomy is stylised rather than idealised. The silhouette of the body, in its linearity, is universal. It rejects gendered attributes and individual characteristics—yet the gaze remains central and is rendered with great expressiveness. With his timeless and raw aesthetic, Kargruber stands as a representative of a contemporary approach that consciously distances itself from dominant modes of current artistic expression.

Oscar Kargruber (b. 1999, Sulzrain, DE) has been studying sculpture at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste – Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main (DE) under Prof. Tobias Rehberger since 2022. Prior to that, he studied at the State Academy of Fine Arts Karlsruhe (DE) from 2021 to 2022. Between 2016 and 2021, Kargruber completed an apprenticeship as a master wood sculptor at the Städtische Berufs- und Meisterschule für das Holzbildhauerhandwerk in Munich (DE). In his work, he focuses primarily on traditional artistic techniques such as sculpture, painting and drawing. While his motifs are usually created in intuitive moments, their symbolism and formality consciously build up references to art history, literature and film.

Kargruber has presented his work at the following institutions: Piktogram, Warsaw (PL), Galleria Fuocherello, Turin (IT), Halfsister, Berlin (DE), Delphispace, Freiburg (DE), Kornhäuschen, Aschaffenburg (DE), Art Basel in Paris (FR). Since 2024, he has been a scholarship holder of the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes.

Installation
Silkscreen on canvas (70 x 70 cm), digital print on mesh (432 x 332 cm, 357 x 457 cm, 427 x 352 cm), digital print on paper, cassette cases (10,16 x 6,35 x 1,27 cm), lp-covers (315 x 312 cm), woven blanket (185 x 150cm), crowbar, mercedes-star, metal ashtray, stickers, painted bedside table, mattress, fabric with concrete (90cm x 200cm)
Courtesy the artist

Ramon Keimig’s work has its roots in printmaking and drawing. His materials are ink and pencil on paper, which he combines with digitally created designs. He edits elements drawn by hand with digital imaging and drawing programmes or duplicates them on the photocopier, laser printer and scanner. He then takes the technical fragility as his theme and incorporates random disruptions as new elements in the compositions.

His pictorial motifs derive from references to the subculture and the psychedelic movement of the 1970s as well as his personal environment. Thus, Keimig uses the private photo collection of his father who died at an early age. This includes a few portraits of his father as a young man who, in search of his identity, got caught up in the turbulence of the 1970s, as well as his photographic impressions that reveal a sensitive view of the world. The artist detaches individual elements of this personal archive from their context to embark on a journey back to a time marked by a strong counterculture, criticism of consumerism, aspirations of individualism and a potent musical subculture.

Informed by references from the photocopy aesthetic of the 1970s and 1980s, his motifs pay tribute to tape culture, underground comics and concert flyers. We encounter here his second artistic field: working with experimental musicians from psychedelic and krautrock, and participating in an underground concert scene.

For both his musical and visual work, Ramon Keimig has accurately examined historical sources and draws parallels to himself and his generation. On this basis, he creates new and original visual worlds, which he samples from his own works and combines in new ways. On the computer screen, he draws and creates collages of found imagery and his own drawings. The designs thus produced he transfers to each of the elements of his spatial installation: a stylised bed, a ceiling, scattered drawings, cassette covers, vinyl covers and the walls and ceiling of the imaginary room.

His work is rigorously kept in black and white. A room has been specially created for the exhibition at the Frankfurter Kunstverein, a place of retreat – an intimate refuge – into inner worlds, for sleep, for lying down and experiencing mind-expanding practices and escaping into artificial paradises.

Keimig designed the room with essential elements only. Hence, it has become a sculpture, in monochrome grey, abstract, representative of a universal experience. This is set in an implied space. It consists of three surfaces that drift apart, displaced from each other, in an imaginary force of flight. The screens are diaphanous supports for his drawings, which he has transferred from the intimate format of his drawing pads to huge picture surfaces, and which hover over the camp like shadows from a dream world of oversized ghosts and narratives. The drawings interweave images from different eras, from the father’s past, with references to the subculture of the past and present, creating a cycle between the generations, the times, the questions that people have always asked themselves.

Ramon Keimig (*1994 in Aschaffenburg, DE) has been a student of drawing and printmaking at the Hochschule für Gestaltung Offenbach with Prof. Mike Bouchet and Prof. Heiner Blum since 2019. Previously, he studied communication design at the University of Applied Sciences Würzburg-Schweinfurt. His practice also includes the publication of numerous art books for example with Ultimo Mono Press, Sevilla (ES) and Nieves, Zurich (CH). His work has been presented at numerous book fairs such as COZI Festival for Contemporary Comics & Zines, Frankfurt am Main (DE), Druckfestival Hot Printing im Klingspormuseum, Offenbach am Main (DE), NY Art Book Fair, New York City (US), Taipei Art Book Fair, Taipei (TW). Among others, Ramon Keimig has presented his works at Feinkunst Krüger, Hamburg (DE) and at Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt am Main (DE) as part of the exhibition project Frankfurter Kunst Vertrieb organised by the collective Magma Maria.