The Berlin based artist Andreas Amrhein (*1963) grew up in Liberia/Africa a.o. and comes from a 300 hundred year old family lineage of farmers. He studied in London, Malmö and Chicago. In the mid 1990's he worked on the 'Beijing - Berlin - Project,' and on behalf of Tan Ping's invitation he travelled to China.

Due to this very colourful upbringing Andreas Amrhein is a storyteller par excellence. In his strongly coloured works, he composes drawings within the painting and combines abstract ideas and ornament, flat characteristic forms with three dimensional executed figuration. Amrhein often paints landscapes, some appearing Asian, in the background using transparent colours, in which he arranges "obstinate" drawings with realistic painted figures in their immediate proximity.

For the exhibition GOOD FRIENDS Amrhein chose the image of classical Meissen porcelain figurines to be the dominant motive. The motive sometimes seems to correspond with the overall work and sometimes seems very alienated from it. The figurines, as good friends from our childhood and stipulated as middle-class kitsch in the collective subconscious, are a symbol of the past in Amrhein's works. He then surrounds these by comments from an equally magnificently colourful but complex and unmanageable present. A past, which the artist does not bemoan the loss of, and a disparate global present within which the artist tries to define a future.

Successive to the opening of the exhibition GOOD FRIENDS, Andreas Amrhein will be travelling to Beijing / China and will move into the studio of the artist-in-residency programme of the gallery in Beijing, initiated by Alexander Ochs.