44flavours

What is the story of 44flavours? We are Julio Rölle and Sebastian Bagge and we met during our studies at FH Bielefeld in 2002. We lived together for a year and started to work in duo on different projects. We quickly started to work on big scale paintings and installations together, did some exhibitions and presented our diploma as a team work. After the studies we opened a small studio in Berlin and kept on working together, for clients and on our personal work, which became more and more important. It represents 80% of what we are doing nowadays. We also found the artist run space ‘Raum Vollreinigung’, together with our friends Clemens Behr and Julius Dörner. This space is at the same time our working studio to paint canvases and to build sculptures, but once a month we also host an art exhibition.

Your work is a mixture of different media, from murals to posters, and painting to sculpture. How do you see the boundary between art and design? This used to be a big question for us when we started to work together, because we are quite in between art and design. We are now working since fifteen years and we decided to leave this question behind us because we don’t need to put a label on everything, especially in our fields.

We notice you like using colors and that your work is very connected to the Abstract Expressionism Movement. How would you quickly describe this personal style and what are your main inspirations? When we are working on paintings and sculptures, the research of the use of colors and how to play with them is definitely one of our main focus. We like to discover different forms of expression and ways to experience contrasts and harmonic moments in paintings. We work as a team, which means that we are debating a lot while we create. It is great to have someone to talk to figure out what the artwork needs to be finished. I guess our work is quite loud and colourful, but it also has something fragile with it. Our inspirations are definitely the Classic Modernism Movement, folk art, art brut as well as the Memphis Group.

You have taken part in several cultural exchanges across the world, can you tell us about one of your most exciting experiences? We have been lucky to be able to travel quite a bit with our work since a couple of years, and yes, there were some great and inspiring moments during these trips. We went to Columbia in 2012 and it was a beautiful experience. We were invited to paint a mural in Cali and we had made a show in a small gallery run by a friend of ours. We spent three weeks in the country and had a really good time. We painted a lot and build a series of new sculptures, we were quite productive. The trip ended with a couple of days in the jungle near the Pacific Ocean. It was a real adventure! After taking a bus to a small village, called Cordoba, we had to change our vehicle and ended up taking a sort of self-built motorcycle, which the Columbians called Brujitas, that was running on an old abandoned train track. We were sitting on the back and the vehicle was running quite fast through the columbian jungle… Interview conducted in February 2018 ©ktlg