Malte Hagen Olbertz, born in 1967 and based in Berlin, creates large-format images that combine objects, figures, and architectural spaces into ambivalent, seductive yet unsettling scenarios. Using light effects and textured surfaces, he places his subjects in a mythical distance. While referencing mythology and art history, his work remains contemporary, juxtaposing plastic debris and bulky waste with golden helmets and classical poses. As Christoph Tannert observes, Hagen oscillates “between sweetness and jelly,” producing images that are suggestive, ambiguous, and open to interpretation.
Your works consciously employ gaps or omissions—such as the missing face in Creative Suite or the gap between the teeth in Inquiry. How do you choose these moments, and what effect are they meant to have on the viewer’s perception?They are meant to feel like understanding between the lines, like the pause after something has been said, in which an intuition or suspicion arises. Japanese poetry has perfected this with haikus. When something becomes too explicit, I remove an element.
Your visual language recalls Dutch masters of the 17th century without imitating them. How do classical techniques of light, space, and stillness influence you, and where do you consciously introduce breaks to create a contemporary sensibility?Everything was once contemporary, and a painter’s way of seeing is so shaped by predecessors that they are also experienced as contemporaries. Still, everything is different today—not only our lived reality, but also the changed concept of art, especially through the emergence of the readymade and performance. I allow elements of this to flow into my work.
I let myself be addressed by things—kitchen utensils, for example, or biomorphic devices. Once I understand what they are, I continue searching in that direction and accumulate them. Much like tastes, this is shaped in childhood; I always liked sitting in the kitchen and painting there. Objects with an ambivalent presence are particularly suitable—it is a play of attraction and repulsion.
In your paintings, the subject is often simultaneously present and elusive. What significance does this play between visibility and disappearance have for your engagement with identity or memory?
The image is assembled in the imagination of the viewer. I can look toward a door and say, “Someone is coming,” and a considerable sense of the presence of the one who is coming already arises. Memory is less important to me; the moment of the invoked thought is too brief for that.
Could you give us a brief outlook: what are you currently working on, and what can we look forward to in the near future?
I am working on transposing the richness of figurative and object-based painting into more abstract territories, in order to paint narratives without narration and a reality without realism.
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