With his photographic or filmic visual aesthetics, Tobias Köbsch, like other generations of artists before him, plays with the principle of illusionism, the deceptive appearance of reality. Yet the technical brilliance of his painted or sculptured tableaus never aims at deceptive seduction into imaginary worlds, but rather at a critical snapshot of the current relationship between image and world consciousness. Unlike the media-reflexive painting of the 1970s and 1980s, Köbsch is not interested in the common representational character of photography, film, and canvas painting. Rather, he seeks to depict the aesthetic forms of coding, especially the emotionalizing quality of current sign production. 

A painted-on conflagration on the dreary facade of a house, messages on delimbed tree trunks, a flag with a pink eagle in dark groves, masked actors in an alpine landscape , saints or shamans of a seemingly unknown religion. Sacrificial animals. Pieces of sky. Pieces of rock. Sedimentary fragments.
The paintings and sculptures of Tobias Köbsch seem like the documentation of a mysterious event in belated witness. A glacier binds material over thousands of years and releases it into the valley like an avalanche during climatic changes. In this way, things suddenly come to the surface that had previously remained hidden.

Similar to a glacier melting, Tobias Köbsch creates a scenario with his works, which has become accessible after an indeterminable event, a mysterious phenomenon or a catastrophe.

This lives from subtle allusion and irritation. Irritation, however, is a preliminary stage of horror, which seems to be almost imperceptibly ironically broken in the works. They give the impression that one is dealing with found objects that have been carefully extracted and cataloged from an area that has been precisely mapped out. However, on closer inspection, they increasingly shed their apparent clarity and leave the viewer - thrown back on himself and alone - in the open field.