The topics of my works are taken from everyday life and document my thoughts on what is happening around me. They are association chains that appear on canvas as composition. Source images I constantly collect with my phone - as a guest in other people's houses, on city walks, in shops.
I find them in old mail order catalogs of my childhood or in form of stock photos and advertising layouts. Thus I compile an archive, which I use as a starting point for my paintings. In it are collected motives that have the potential to describe the here and now - evoke thoughts, imply answers or reflect a certain mood present in society. Out of this mass of pictures I choose some, collage, modify and edit them. This way I contemplate about themes that help me to better understand my surrounding.
There are several reoccurring topics of interest: power structures, physical money, comfort food, ideals of beauty and hygiene. The decelerating medium of painting allows for more time to think about these subjects. But the works themselves don't aim to give answers or illustrate my theories about the worlds events. They are rather linked leaps of thought that can evoke thoughts or feelings - in me and others. I see my works as conversation starters. They are a vehicle to get people talking to each other, to share thoughts on the painting and develop ideas together.
Another aspect of my work is imitation or quotation. My paintings are quoting imagery. I am using advertising compositions, but also cinematic elements, snapshot aesthetics and classic iconography. I use pictures that send you to past decades and then again some that refer to 3D software and thus are rooted in our time. The thought that images are encoded with time and offer the possibility to therefor travel through time and space merely by seeing, interests me greatly.
But also from a painterly perspective, it expands the compositional instruments and creates an equal parallelism of motifs on canvas, without neglecting the traditional ideas of landscape painting or portrait or abstraction or figuration.
The idea of quoting and moving through space can also be found in the installation of my exhibitions. On one hand, in order to be able to see all the works, you have to move through the exhibition space - bend down, stretch, look around the corner - on the other hand I am using prominent characteristics of the venues, quote them in different positions, point out oddities and thus create an awareness of the real-live space, proclaiming paintings as real-life objects rather than 2d images.