Dorothée Bauerle-Willert

Translated by Elizabeth Volk

Oliver Scharfbier’s works may be ironic, impudent, mean, burdened with memory, subtle, brash, and melodramatic. But they always live from the daring, yet sensitive access to local material he has found and introduced into multi-layered spatial pictures and installations. His multi-stranded formal language is worked into ever new arrangements, and because of how the compilation is put into a specific local context, a confusing narrative emerges from out of discontinuous moments of action. In the ongoing mutual permeation of levels, texts, and textures the new gets mixed in with the old, becomes assembled, though this is not permanent—everything looks as if there were only a short pause in the decay of materials. It is the fading of impressions and desires that may crumble to pieces at any moment. [...]