Shiny heaps of meat just as in a butchery, stacked bodily masses, resembling of rolled pork roast, fatty bodies looking like plucked chicken. Rolf Ohst's fascination for immense carnality and the special presentation would instantly remind one of Roald Dahls narraton "pig" in which a seclusively linving vegetarian comes to town, learns to love meat just to be slaughtered himself, if there weren't decided motives that are borrowed by Rolf Ohst from the art history.



From Botticelli's "Birth of Venus", Giorgiones "Venus in a landscape", Tizians Venus in bourgeois interior via nudes by Rembrandt, Manet, Renoir, Modigliani, Matisse, up to Cézanne or Corinth - Rolf Ohst cites them all. Doing that, he overreaches the baroque plentitude to the extreme. He paints Botticelli's Venus in gracefully trembling shy corpulence and placing his figures in maritime landscapes with dramaticly clouded skies which let the famous dutch masterpieces come to life alltough the figures are kept characteristic of classic modern. When he names his resting, fat beauty reminiscent of a stranded whale gasping for breath, after Edward Munch's famous "The Scream" the sampling becomes perfect. Rolf Ohst manages to tie in with best traditions of nude-painting in a disrespectful humorous way and to convert them into the presence.



Dr. Stefanie Lucci, 2009