Johann Gottfried Schadow, 2014 

Christoph Brech set out to discover Schadow’s art in the everyday life of Berlin. He climbed up to the Quadriga at the top of the Brandenburger Tor, visited the “Münzfries” stored under the Kreuzberg Memorial and also the State Museums’ workshops, where the plaster impressions were cast.
His search for contemporary elements in what is long past led not to a documentation, but to a creative act.
 
Brech’s very personal works of art span the generations, revealing in the present what once was, and in the past intimations of today. Contemporary answers to questions of form and content which occupied Schadow are sought in these works, whether it be The Dance as a metaphor of life, or man’s mortality, or the solitude accompanying power.
 
Christoph Brech’s craft of imbedding great works of Classicism in the daily affairs of the present does not detract from Schadow’s art. On the contrary, he rescues it for the present by removing it from the secluded silence of the museum, as well as from the deafening clamor of commercialized visual over-stimulation.
Brech offers a play of associations, a sort of game between life and art, which reveals new and unexpected “views”, allowing Schadows’s work to move us even today.
 
Andreas Kaernbach