BERNHARD HOLASCHKE

“My artistic practice unfolds between silence and noise, the archaic and the digital, fullness and emptiness. It follows an inner logic of collage and develops between painting and the moving image — at times involving collaborative and performative processes. Its starting points are fragments — atavistic forms, digital remnants, signs and textures—that migrate across media and inscribe themselves into new constellations. I play and explore.

In painting, layered surfaces emerge in which gesture, imitation, and symbolic trace converge. Hybrid spaces such as caves, raves, landscapes, or ruins appear as image-sites that are both remembered and imagined. Figuration, symbolism, mark-making, and abstract propositions stand side by side on equal terms. In several bodies of work, the division of pictorial space serves as a conceptual device: a tablet on which contradictory logics can coexist.

The dialogue between media is central. What accelerates and splinters in the digital image-space appears in painting slowed down, condensed, and material. Painting, animation, and performance thus become methods of thinking — an investigation of rhythm, transformation, and recurrence.

Across all formats, I search for what remains human within a fragmented present. The works open spaces of attention and sustain tension without settling into a single, definitive meaning.”

Holaschke moves across a wide keyboard of painterly styles and art-historical references. The Rave and Cave Paintings represent more than thematic poles—they visualise an inquiry into the interplay of all things. They internalise Holaschke’s approach to the monumental and its simultaneous deconstruction.

Archaic forms encounter monochrome planes and expressive gestures. The mimesis of stone in trompe-l’œil technique is disrupted by comic-like shadows; expressive brushwork is countered by fields of color.

If the cave appears in Holaschke’s work as the origin chosen by humankind—a place where humanity found shelter and time—then the Rave Paintings depict spaces once created by humans and now abandoned.

And the cave—is it still itself? It appears as the threatening backdrop of a theatre. Deep within it something slumbers—the longing itself. And the Rave Paintings? Longing, lost in the machine.

Holaschke’s music videos are immediate, affective journeys of rare visual density. He combines thousands of mor phing single-frame collages, renders polygonal 3D landscapes, and weaves them precisely to the rhythm of sound.

He describes his animated collages as “an accumulation and feedback of my symbolic world.” His forms often first assemble on screen: they drift toward each other, collide, disintegrate, compare, and transform — dancing to the beat. Some later reappear on large-scale canvases or as sculptural fragments.

In his music videos, Holaschke edits and collides images of temples and tennis courts, Care Bears and legionnaires, aquariums, household appliances, and libraries. The visual torrent pushes perception to its limits: signs, forms, and symbols become chains of ecstatic association, hammered to the rhythm and driven straight into the mind — a synaesthetic bombardment.

Or, to put it differently: Holaschke conducts vision, pulling the viewer through waves of rhythm into the image-floods of chaos — yet allowing us to remain composed like no other. It becomes a recovery of the self — the catharsis of an endless rave night, condensed into a five-minute acceleration ritual.

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On the occasion of the EP release by the Icelandic DJ and producer on the in-house label of Berlin’s Tresor Club, the artist Bernhard Holaschke created an animated cartoon music video. A single sequence unfolds a complete narrative—handcrafted, delicate, direct, raw, and reminiscent of early stop-motion films. It is a homage to the beginnings of digital compositing, when technological limitations became a poetic gesture.

An alien—blended with a touch of Norse mythology and the attitude of a raver—visits a nightclub. Exos stands at the turntables. The video is filled with subtle and absurd references to Berlin’s club culture of the 2000s. Following the steady 4/4 pulse, it carries the hypnotic spirit of techno—balanced between tension and monotony. Over the course of the night, nothing really happens, and yet everything does: nothing beyond the expected rhythm of a club evening, and yet everything within it, in unexpected ways. Nothing but atmosphere. And plenty of it. Except: An alien riding a goat-drawn quadriga enters the club— and somehow appears completely normal.

The alien, wearing a fisherman‘s hat and smoking a joint, recurs throughout Holaschke’s work. Originally conceived as an ironic emblem of 1990s techno culture, Holaschke endows it with a second meaning: that of a detached observer of earthly affairs—perhaps, in Holaschke’s view, the embodiment of the artist’s own gaze.

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“The ancient existent collides with the recent in the repetition of itself. Only through repetition can the new prove itself as new, in relation to the old,” Holaschke observes. Here, his wit and seriousness are closely intertwined.

In the style of these collages and ink drawings, Holaschke produced hundreds of works during the pandemic, giving each a title and arranging them rhythmically, much like in his music videos. He engaged deeply with book design and published the volume → Do You Believe in Gods → with Distanz Verlag.

The term Iconomy Papers reflects Holaschke’s dual logic: iconic systems are examined, organized, and interrelated, while simultaneously considering the economy of means — the relationship between material, trace, and effect, between surface and concept. Each sheet becomes an experimental field, exploring both the management of symbols and the productive tension between possibilities and material. Holaschke’s titles add an additional linguistic layer, which not only comments on the visual structures but further amplifies their semantic dynamics.

These works reveal the core of Holaschke’s method: layering, ambiguity, and the suspension of decision. Each sheet constitutes a field of potential meanings, an open system that directs attention to processes rather than fixed outcomes. The Iconomy Papers thus become more than a collection of sketches — they form an icono-economic practice, where material, symbol, visual structure, and language exist in tension and resonance. In Holaschke’s paper works, images and titles intertwine to create fields of becoming, experimentation, and multiple acts of seeing and reading.

These and other works were shown in Bernhard Holaschke’s exhibition “I Do Many Things”.

On this occasion, the book “This Is All I Could Do” was published. Both titles, of course, mean the same. → → Publishing House Click Here →

The recurring division across many of Holaschke’s painting series — each side obeying its own pictorial logic — perhaps best reveals the artist’s simultaneous doubt and conviction within any system of ideas.

Some compositions remain faithful to this dual rhythm, while others open toward a third plane: fossils, fire, archaic and religious symbolic traces emerge, making time and immateriality visible. This third stratum pushes forward, in front of the divided image. Within the painting, Holaschke lets us follow its own excavation.

Thus, Holaschke´s paintings becomes reverse archaeology — a process of thought that uncovers rather than conceals, revealing how meaning condenses, erodes, and reappears in new layers. Each work is both division and reunion, a surface that remembers.

In 2022, visual artist Bernhard Holaschke joined forces with British DJ and producer Blawan to develop a live audiovisual performance. The result: a two year tour across Europe, from major festivals and underground clubs to the stage of the Berlin Philharmonie, where sound and vision collided in an overwhelming intensity.

As music journalist Eoin Murray wrote in his article “Industrial Strength” for DJ MAG (November 2022), following their performance at the Unbound Festival in Sheffield’s St. Peter and Paul Cathedral:

“That feeling lingers during Blawan and visual artist Bernhard Holaschke’s live A/V set. As rib-rattling beats erupt from the South York shire native’s hardware, a kaleidoscopic carousel of animation flares up behind them: burning tropics, aliens, knights, witches, dragons, cy bergoths and Teletubbies all flash up and disappear, replaced by a chopped-up snogging clip from a Twilight film and scenes like something from a fantasy video game. Equal parts absorbing and overwhelming, it’s a tidal wave of stimuli that channels the ‘information overload’ the fu turist author Alvin Toffler wrote about in his books Future Shock and The Third Wave, which inspired the birth of techno music in Detroit.

In a similar way to how Juan Atkins and co. fashioned themselves on Toffler’s ‘techno rebels’ — who embraced, rather than feared, the technological advances of post-industrial society — this performance harnesses the relentlessness of data consumption today. Turning it into a piece of exhilarating art, to be displayed in a place of worship, feels like a scream straight back into the monster’s mouth. With the cathedral’s incredible acoustics at play, it also just sounds gnarly as all hell, and fills festival-goers with fuel for the night ahead.”

Holaschke’s drawings are records of his movement within the visible – they give form to possibility. On paper, everything comes together: marker, watercolor, felt-tip, ballpoint, ink. There is no plan at the beginning, only readiness. Everything connects. Everything turns out well.

We follow Holaschke through canyons and museums, across ski slopes and mountain peaks, through temples and up to goat pens. “As a traveler and wanderer, he carries movement in his artistic DNA,” writes Dr. Marc Gundel. When Holaschke calls his diary-like drawings Field Notes, the title doubles – or more than doubles – its meaning. Notes are gestures of consciousness, not its conclusion. The field can be a space of experience, a structure of thought, or a field of tension. The field is not the studio. The field is the outside world. The harvest comes later.

The screen is flat, the stage alive. In Holaschke’s Screen and Scene Paintings, the canvas becomes the screen, the screen becomes the stage — formats that evoke the cinematic frame. Fragments spanning the full range of cultural references are layered — sampled, remixed, repainted. Illegible forms meet digitally rendered landscapes and popcultural figures. Signs and symbols mingle with orange slices and fried eggs, waterfalls, meadows and quotes of historical paintings; archaic same as historical figures stand alongside Bugs Bunny, Conan the Barbarian, Cyber Goths and the Teletubbies.

In Holaschke’s practice, forms and motifs return — not as repetition, but as memory in motion. Signs, symbols, and gestures migrate from one work to another — from collage to stage, from painting to sculpture, from movement to matter and back again. Each return alters the form; each repetition insists on difference.

Across media, a visual language unfolds — elastic, restless, alive. What once appeared as pigment might re-emerge with sound or structure. Every transformation retains a trace of what came before — not as nostalgia, but as continuity in flux. This is recurrence not as loop, but as affirmation — a will to reappear, to transform, to say yes to change itself. Echoing Nietzsche’s thought of eternal return, Holaschke’s forms test the possibility of renewal within repetition. Each painting, each gesture, reaffirms its existence by returning — shifted, charged, and quietly transformed.

Backwards Archaeology: Beyond the recurrence of motifs, the layering of semantic strata constitutes a central structure ofHolaschke´s practice. His pictorial symbols do not unfold linearly but accumulate as stratified signifying regimes: each layer opens a trajectory of meaning while simultaneously resisting any final stabilization. Meaning is not resolved but proliferated.

Holaschke’s fire paintings — exemplified by Inversion of matter—make this process explicit. Their logic follows the transformational sequences of fire: combustion, dissolution, residue, masking, camouflage, gasification, light formation. What appears as destruction becomes a production of multiplicity: ash, smoke, emergent materialities, chromatic shifts, brightness. The dissolution of one material renders the formerly existing visible — an iconographic reconstruction by way of subtraction.

Here, Holaschke’s practice aligns with Didi-Huberman’s insistence that images do not reveal themselves through transparency, but through the very opacity of their layers, through the sediments of what has vanished and what persists. Holaschke’s surfaces function as such sites of tension: a whitewash that — recalling Aristotle’s notion of disguise — veils and transforms the conceptual core. Surface becomes an epistemic veil; the question of what lies beneath survives only as an after image.

Powder: Ashes to ashes, but also the cultural encoding of the fireplace as a space of domesticity. Holaschke maintains this tension between the homely and the uncanny (Freud), producing what Didi-Huberman might call a survival of forms—an oscillation between comfort and excess, between recognition and the overabundance of the imaginable.

Holaschke´s images thus become matrices of coexisting antagonisms: safety and danger, destruction and production, surface and substratum. Holaschke does not collapse these tensions; he sustains them as simultaneous strata, allowing contradictions to inhabit the same pictorial field without subordination. The resulting layers lay traces that deliberately dissolve into indeterminacy. Holaschke’s practice destabilizes historicity rather than securing it — akin to the point where the factual slips into farce, and the documentary mutates into the fictional.

This position resonates with Nietzsche’s perspectivism, which rejects the notion of singular, privileged truth in favor of a multiplicity of coexisting inter pretations. Holaschke’s suspension of decision — his refusal to reduce complexity by selecting one meaning over another — enacts a Nietzschean refusal of the “tyranny of the one.” Instead, the work affirms a field of potential meanings, an openness aligned with Nietzsche’s vision of truth as a mobile army of metaphors.

The logic of non-decision in Holaschke’s work also resonates with Deleuze’s concept of the rhizome, where meaning is produced not through hierarchical structure but through lateral connections, proliferations, and intensities. Holaschke’s images do not move toward a teleological resolution; they operate as planes of immanence, where heterogeneous elements coexist, interact, and generate effects without requiring unity or closure. His Layering is thus Deleuzian: a practice of multiplicity, of surfaces that think, of images as sites of becoming rather than being.

Art, in this sense, is the space where Holaschke can enact a form of methodological suspension—a resistance to functionalization, instrumentalization, or definitive interpretation. The artwork establishes its own temporality and epistemology: it remains processual, stratifying, non-finalizing. Its force lies precisely in this structural incompleteness — this affirmation of becoming over being, of multiplicity over univocity, of potential over resolution.