I collect the image sources for my painting in everyday life. I take photos with my smartphone in other people’s apartments, on walks through the city and in shops, I find motifs in old mail-order catalogues from my childhood, in stock photos and advertising layouts. This is how an archive comes into being, from which I select, collage and paint. Many of these images arrive already worn. They are shaky, yellowed or out of focus, and it is precisely these traces that interest me. I quote these images together with their wear. There are images that transport you into past decades, and then again others that reference phone zoom-ins and are thus rooted in our own time. The thought that images are encoded with time, and thereby offer the possibility of travelling through time and space by mere looking, interests me greatly.
Two themes keep returning. The first is the drawer, also the box, the carton, the vault. They are archives without classification. You open them in search of something specific and instead find memories. In the series “Put It Somewhere” I paint these moments of searching, in which household items, important things and junk pile up into a collage of times.
The second theme is domestic cosiness in times of crisis. The stove, the crystal ball, cash, home cooking: these are images of a home that promises stability, while energy questions, financial crises and advertising promises complicate the situation. The paintings give no answers. They are chains of association and conversation openers.
The decelerating process of painting gives me time to think about these things. On the canvas, the motifs remain blurred, like snapshots that failed to capture a movement, or memories that can no longer be brought into focus.
The idea of quoting, and of moving through space, recurs in the installation of my exhibitions. On the one hand, to see all the works, you have to move through and explore the exhibition space. I like when you have to stoop, stretch, peek around a corner. On the other hand, I use prominent characteristics of the exhibition venues, quote them in different positions, point out oddities and so create an awareness of the actually existing space. In this way, the paintings assert themselves as objects of physical life.
They’re things. They’re here with us, in physical space. Real, strange, and speaking.
Two themes keep returning. The first is the drawer, also the box, the carton, the vault. They are archives without classification. You open them in search of something specific and instead find memories. In the series “Put It Somewhere” I paint these moments of searching, in which household items, important things and junk pile up into a collage of times.
The second theme is domestic cosiness in times of crisis. The stove, the crystal ball, cash, home cooking: these are images of a home that promises stability, while energy questions, financial crises and advertising promises complicate the situation. The paintings give no answers. They are chains of association and conversation openers.
The decelerating process of painting gives me time to think about these things. On the canvas, the motifs remain blurred, like snapshots that failed to capture a movement, or memories that can no longer be brought into focus.
The idea of quoting, and of moving through space, recurs in the installation of my exhibitions. On the one hand, to see all the works, you have to move through and explore the exhibition space. I like when you have to stoop, stretch, peek around a corner. On the other hand, I use prominent characteristics of the exhibition venues, quote them in different positions, point out oddities and so create an awareness of the actually existing space. In this way, the paintings assert themselves as objects of physical life.
They’re things. They’re here with us, in physical space. Real, strange, and speaking.