Tobias Spichtig:

Heavy Mental

Opening: Friday, June 13, 6 - 8 pm

Zahnradstrasse 21, Zurich

Spichtig’s practice is grounded in a persistent negotiation with presence, absence, and the conditions of perception. While his paintings are resolutely figurative, his portraits are as much intimate likenesses as idols—figures rendered with the stylized detachment of a magazine cover or bedroom poster, gesturing toward a collective escaping of feelings, fragmentation, and dislocation but pointing towards something to long for. In their hollowed gazes and affectless stillness, one senses a generation caught between visibility and dissolution, between the illusion of knowing and the reality of never quite arriving at meaning. What connects these figures is the gaze that shapes them, one that remains unchanged whether painting those closest to him—friends, collaborators—or long-admired cultural figures. Spichtig’s gaze remains constant: a fan’s awe, pure and unrelenting. In this Warholian perspective everyone is both person and myth. The artist’s admiration is not diminished by proximity—if anything, it deepens, becoming less about fantasy and more about shared history, presence and feelings.