2021
Falling Sensations, Galerie Mellies (solo, coming up)
Koschatzky-Art-Award, Palais Schönborn-Batthyány, Wien
Riga Art Space, Lettland (Coming up)
Franz-Hecker-Stipendium (Zweiter Preis)
What is germany about today?
As a painter, I am fascinated by surfaces. The closest you can come to the surface of a state is its flag. Inspired by worn out flags, that hung from balconies in poor parts of the city, the Neutschland Scheme was developed. Instead of black, red and yellow, the Neutschland Scheme consists of violet, rosa and pale yellow. Going deeper in the superficial appearance of country, politics and media discourse, you will always recognize narratives. Complex matters are facilitated into simple slogans. People of public interest are rather seen as decal images, armed with catchphrases instead of discourse knowledge providing opinions instead of arguments.
In Neutschland, a dreamland is painted. A worryless utopia.
A heap of ruins: "However, there is also another work: it is precise, clear, neat. And it is not a painting, but a sculpture. Its point of departure is one of the most enigmatic works in art history, Albrecht Dürer’s etching Melencolia I. Therein a winged being, in pensive thought, sits before a truncated triangular trapezohedron, a geometric object even more complex than its name. Aaron replicates this polyhedron in large numbers and builds these objects into a column that could be endless, each object carrying the insignias of Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes.The work’s title: I love America and America loves me.
This work of art is a little stroke of genius, quoting no less than five heroes of art history: Dürer, Warhol, the Romanian Constantin Brancusi, who invented the endless column, and Joseph Beuys, whose New York performance in 1974 gave the work its title. The mystic Beuys and the pop artist Warhol belonged to the second-to-last generation of the „heroic“ modern period, before conceptual art finalised that era and the idea of the post-modern took the lead. Aaron’s homage to modernism is, at the same time, a caricature of this era: there is hardly anything more absurd than taking, of all things, one of the most complex geometric structures as the basis for endless repetitions.
With this sculpture the young artist characterises the situation his generation is facing: it’s a heap of ruins. The major fuel of modern art, innovation, has fallen flat[.]"
Exerpt from: Dr. Ernst A. Busche: Aaron Rahe
Seemingly unattached topics are forced together to generate something new. Productive misunderstandings generate beauty. The relation of ground and figure works like the relation of the human and the world. Layers of paint are forming tissues that are forming figures, that are forming a body of work. Painting is like wrestling. Showfights, outfits, faces and heels.
The "Agenda Patata" paintings are recurring to the topos of the still life, grading it up towards the potatoe. "You potatoe" has become a common insult for germans. The potatoes are starting point for rather graphical examinations of light and shade in the tradition of nature studies. The weird, useless objects indicate a creator and are sometimes combined with other materials, or figures, such as floating metaphysical frites, or a golden background like they were russian icons.
The "Pyramid Schemes" Series represents a very special way of uniting painting and collage: Paint glues together thrown away and torn out pages that are crumbled to resemble snowballs. Art history books, fine art magazines and catalogues of auction houses build up most of the work. Each of these works is crowned by a reproduction of a work by Aaron Rahe, visualizing the central art market mechanic: Once aquired into a collection, collectors and museums are bound to praise the work of the artist, if they do not want to risk gambling with the worth of their aquisition.
Using art history and personal mythologies as working material, I portrait contemporary paradigms in front of classical backdrops to show their permanent presence. Insufficience meets hybris.
Altered states of mind require altered forms of art. Contemporary technology evokes contemporary feelings. Never before has technology felt so warm, has work felt so much like family, have peergroups replaced subcultures.
The paintings resemble interior or exterior sensations. In this logic, paintings like "super awake" are made out of paint and coffee grounds, while "super asleep" is enhanced by crushed sleeping pills. In terms of composition, the golden frame of digital face recognition replaces the urge to portrait faces, and the tinfoil hats of conspiracy theorists become the rembrandtish icons of our time.
Falling Sensations, Galerie Mellies (solo, coming up)
Koschatzky-Art-Award, Palais Schönborn-Batthyány, Wien
Riga Art Space, Lettland (Coming up)
Franz-Hecker-Stipendium (Zweiter Preis)
Preisträger des Förderpreis Junge Kunst 2020 (Kunstverein Centre Bagatelle & kommunale Galerie Reineckendorf)
Museumsquartier Osnabrück (Shortlist: Kunstpreis Osnabrück) (Katalog)
Neu:Denken, Delphi.Space, Freiburg im Breisgau
Kunstverein Kaponier, Vechta (solo)
"Die Nacht", Shortlist Kunstpreis der Gemeinde Rastede (Katalog)
This very book, Vexer Verlag, Berlin
Mutatio, Pink Grig, Moskau
Start 57, Burg Bentheim, Bad Bentheim
sabot.mimi.faster, Berlin
Aaron Rahe – Förderpreisträger Malerei der Öffentlichen Versicherungen Oldenburgs, Stadtmuseum Oldenburg (solo)
Get low, Popup Show im Parkwächterhaus im Lietzensee (solo)
High Five, Vitrine_01, Berlin (solo) (Katalog)
Leicht.Sinn, Shortlist, Kunstpreis Kunstverein Wesseling, Wesseling, D
Kunstverein Ahlen
Gopea Förderjahrgang 2017, Villa de Bank, Enschede, NL
Enzyklopädie des Zarten, Galerie im Körnerpark, Berlin (Katalog)
Curatorials, Alte Münze Berlin
Zagreus Projects, Berlin
Helmut Art Space, Leipzig (solo)
#wortedenenkeinetatenfolgen, Projektraum Kunstquartier Bethanien, Berlin
Werte_Gemeinschaft, Schwartzsche Villa, Berlin (Katalog)
Junge Prager, Junge Berliner I, Kunst- und Designzentrum SMETANA Q, Prag
Junge Prager, Junge Berliner II, Tschechische Botschaft, Berlin (Katalog)
Museum Villa Stahmer, Georgsmarienhütte (solo)
Shortlist: Kunstpreis Haus am Kleistpark, Berlin
Junge Kunst im Ruhrgebiet: Shortlist Wilhelm-Zimolong-Förderpreis der Stadt Gladbeck (Katalog)
Cross-Section, Busche Kunst
Kunst Kaufen, Karl Hofer Gesellschaft, UDK Berlin (Katalog)
weiss lügt, La Chaufferie, Strasbourg
3 Tage Kunst, Kommunale Galerie Charlottenburg, Berlin (Katalog)
p/art Hamburg (Katalog)
Bürgergalerie, Neumünster (solo)
Zu Besuch, Projektraum DMNDKT, Berlin
Galerie Florent Tosin, Berlin
happy black bile. Projektraum zqm, Berlin (solo) (Katalog)
Galerie Lake, Oldenburg
Sezzession, SEZ-Berlin
Nachschlag, Uferhallen Berlin
Kunstfoyer am Langenweg, Oldenburg (solo)
Strange but true, Absolventenausstellung, Kiel
GALERIE schwarz | weiss, Osnabrück (solo)
Wilde Jäger, FRISCH Kunsthalle, Berlin
Landesvertretung Schleswig-Holsteins, Brüssel, Belgien
Die multistopischen Körper, Gängeviertel, Hamburg
So jung kommen wir nicht mehr zusammen, Galerie des bbk-Oldenburg
Museum Villa Stahmer, Georgsmarienhütte (solo)
Galerie Lake, Oldenburg
Künstlerhaus Jan Oeltjen, Jaderberg (2009)
2015 Meisterschüler, Universität der Künste Berlin
2014 Absolvent, Universität der Künste Berlin
2010 M.F.A.-Studium, Muthesius Kunsthochschule Kiel, Master of Arts, Integrated Media,
Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg
2007 Bachelor of Arts, Kunst und Medien, Philosophie,
Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg,
* 1986 Teutoburger Wald, Niedersachsen
Studios in Berlin, Oldenburg, Osnabrück
2021 Koschatzky-Art-Award (Nominierung)
2021 Franz-Hecker-Stipendium (Zweiter Preis)
2020 Kunstpreis Osnabrück (Nominierung)
2020 Förderpreis Junge Kunst des Centre Bagatelle (Preisträger)
2019 Kunstpreis der Gemeinde Rastede (Nominierung)
2018 Förderpreis Malerei der Kulturstiftung der Öffentlichen Versicherungen Oldenburg (Preisträger)
Kunstpreis Wesseling
(Nominierung)
Sonderkunstpreis des Kunstvereins Ahlen
(Nominierung)
2016 Kunstpreis des Haus am Kleistpark, Berlin (Nominierung)
Wilhelm-Zimolong Preis der Stadt Gladbeck
(Nominierung)
2015 & 16 Warsteiner Blooom Award (Nominierung)