Gernot Bubenik - The 60's

Since 1967 the loft in an old factory building is Bubeniks epicenter and micro cosmos. Here, art was created, theories developed, children raised, earthworms cultivated and new paint invented. Around it buildings were squatted, torn down. The Berlin wall fell, his loft burned and the firefighters threw all his painting into the courtyard. But still, up here, high above Berlins infamous neighborhood Kreuzberg, the Bubenik universe stayed preserved like in a cocoon.

Born in Troppau, Czech Republic Bubenik was enamored very early on by natural sciences and technic. That was long before he had an interest for art. As a middle school student in Oberpfaffenhofen near Munich, Bavaria, he read science fiction novels, tried to breed primeval giant horsetails, and built an impractical device that should make drawn lines audible according to the principle of a turntable. After school, at age 15, the hobby engineer took an internship at Würzburg's Max Planck Institute for Silicate Research, but finally opted for a botanical career and raised tomatoes until his journeyman's examination.

Though he quickly found practical botany a "waste of time" the journeyman found use for it later on: As a student with the Berlin fine art professor Wolf Hoffmann, Bubenik was initially inspired by his garden layouts, which he implemented in city plans, and soon invented similar organic patterns as well as technical ones.
In human settlements, in plants and machinery, the artist discovered comparable structures, which he now wants to make them visible in his pictures.

Bubenik borrowed his concept from an electronic process he observed 1957 at the Max - Planck -Institute: He had seen a computer, which turns the X-ray diagram of a crystal into a series of numbers, and then into a diagram of the molecules.

Gernot Bubeniks early momories:
Born into a German family in Troppau, Czech Republic in 1942, Bubenik's earliest memories are shaped by the end of the war. In his own words "a time of chaos, fear and uncertainty". After Germany lost the war many of the several centuries old German settlements in different parts of Europe faced a very difficult situation. Bubenik's mother, with her husband missing in the war, decided to join her relatives on the long journey to Germany. A country they hardly new. During this journey they spend month after month in a utility train, parked in train stations until the authorities new were to send them next. Bubenik remembers this time, surprisingly enough, in a positive manner. The war was behind them and his family was relieved to have survived while others were not as lucky. The train tracks lead all of them to a new beginning.