From July 17, 2014

After a series of artistic projects with photography, wall drawing and mural painting, two monumental wall prints by the young Berlin artist Maximilian Thiel will now be on display at the Kunst-Station in Wolfsburg Central Station under the title "Mausoleum II 2014 Petrograffiti".

Derived from traditional printing techniques, such as copperplate engraving or drypoint etching, the artist further developed these printmaking processes and now transfers them to the expansive medium of the wall. In an intensive working process, two opulent wall etchings were thus created at Wolfsburg Central Station, which stand in an antagonistic dialogue to the minimalist floor work by Daniel Buren.

Whereas in the 16th century Albrecht Dürer still used a drawing pencil and drypoint as tools, with the help of which, as with a dissecting knife, every finest and smallest detail of reality had to be worked out and exposed, today Maximilian Thiel, who was born in 1984 in Berlin and lives and works in Berlin and Mexico, reaches for mechanical cut-off and angle grinders, round and flat rasps, as well as various engraving and cutting tools. With these, the artist carves and stabs, files and grinds into the walls of the waiting area of the main train station. In doing so, Maximilian Thiel not only inscribes himself temporally and physically into this space. At the same time, in this process he uncovers - layer by layer - the previously painstakingly applied colored plaster material.

This original process of pictorial invention, which in Maximilian Thiel's work exhibits a high degree of representationalism or recognizability and plays with different varieties of figuration, is not primarily aimed at the artistic representation of the real or the actual. Rather, the artist is interested in the subterranean, the hidden: all that moves under the perceptible surface of the visible and in ancient rites, traditional rituals and traditional myths resurfaces, seeks its expression and reappears in new forms.

In 2012, the artist took the opportunity to visit and study with restorers from UNAM (National Autonomous University of Mexico) the mural painting of Bonampak, one of the most important Mayan cult sites in Chiapas on the border with Guatemala. Against the background of the intensive, artistic examination of this traditional formal language, the fusion of past and present in the key medium of contemporary mural painting in Mexico and the resulting questions about one's own identity in a foreign culture, Maximilian Thiel's wall cuttings were created and can be seen at Wolfsburg Central Station.