**DIARIO DE AVISOS**

*Santa Cruz de Tenerife*

The cultural society **Liceo de Taoro**, in **La Orotava**, will open an exhibition tomorrow, Thursday (8:00 p.m.), featuring the work of artist **Ernst Volland** (Bürgstadt, 1946)—a photographer, illustrator, gallerist, blogger, curator, and German writer who has lived in **Berlin since 1968**.

Volland, explains **Birgit Rauschenbach**, contemporary art curator and founding member of the **Ojalá** association in **Icod de los Vinos**, specializes in satire, forgeries, and photography.

„In one of his first artistic forgeries,“ Rauschenbach details in the introductory text *Humor and Politics* to the exhibition, „Volland invented the French artist **Blaise Vincent**—a reference to Vincent van Gogh—painted his works in a few days, and quickly found success, to the point that the **National Gallery of Berlin** became aware of Blaise Vincent. Several forgeries followed, which later led to the book *The Art of Forgery*, in which he describes various false actions, thereby foreshadowing the current uproar surrounding forgeries in the news and on social media.“

Birgit Rauschenbach explains that Volland’s most recent works are the *Früchtchen*, in which „he outlines a piece of fruit in ink, resulting in a painting meant to bring a smile.“

**“A FREE VERSE”**

„A unique artist, eccentric, original thinker, idealist, curious, nonconformist, a free verse who abhors mediocrity, transgressive, creative, brilliant, alternative, and so on—until all possible adjectives are exhausted—is how specialized critics describe the prolific German artist,“ says **Sebastián Estévez Pérez**, cultural manager.

**Licenciado en Historia del Arte**,

in the text titled *Ernst Volland, la mirada sardónica* (Ernst Volland, The Sardonic Gaze), which also accompanies the exhibition that will be on display until May 10 at the **Liceo de Taoro** (open daily from 10:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m.).  

„Since his first exhibitions,“ highlights **Estévez**, „Volland’s bold typographic experiments, far from flattering the established power, confront it head-on. His theoretical reflections on the role of art in the political struggle of the German people after the restoration of democracy are exposed with all their sharpness and irony for public scrutiny, capable of triggering psychological processes of identification or rejection, but far from the ambiguity or condescension with which many creators treat their rulers.“  

The organizers of the exhibition, **Sebastián Estévez** adds, hope that it will help people understand that „the subversive potential lies within the very nature of art.“