Christoph Niemann Shows Art in Romania for First Time

The central space of the exhibition is the wall that welcomes visitors at one of the rooms at the gigantic Palace of the Parliament built by communist dictator Nicolae Ceauescu, which hosts the museum. This central space features Sunday Sketches, perhaps the most personal collection of Niemann's oeuvre.

The Sunday Sketches are made up of drawings that the artist, who defines himself as a "visual storyteller", combines with everyday-life objects to represent other completely different items or situations. A bundle of two bananas is used to portray the rump of a jumping horse whose forepart has been drawn and coloured by Niemman in a matching yellow that gives a surprising visual consistency to the composition.

"The idea is for the viewer to recognise the object and that the combination feels inevitable," he says.

Niemann spoke to BIRN at the opening of his exhibition about the process of creating his Sunday Sketches, and whether they are the result of immediate associations that strike his mind when randomly seeing an object.

"When you look at a thing and immediately say, oh, this could be this, these are always bad ideas, because they are obvious, and they are boring," he told BIRN. "This idea of the Sunday Sketches was really made as an exercise to go away from that first thing that one sees," Niemann added, explaining that the process usually "takes a long time" and sometimes bear no fruit as he can't see any powerful resemblance in the object.

The exhibition, which opened on 27 February and runs until 29 March, also includes some of Niemann's work for the international publications that made him famous, such as the cover of the New York Times Books Review issue dedicated to the Guantánamo Diary and the illustration that opened a ...