Works

The series “Spiegelbilder” is concerned with renegotiating the perspectival center.

By juxtaposing iconic images from art history with themselves, the original center becomes the background, and what was previously at the edge becomes the new focal point. A space in-between emerges — both in the relation of the motifs to one another, and in the relationship between frame, space, and painting.

The gaze moves between two halves of the image, which together form a whole, interwoven in their contradiction.

This moment of unreality is intensified by the contactless application of paint. During the painting process, the color pushes from the painted surface into the layers behind it, which become the front once the canvas is stretched.

In the ambivalent simultaneity of large-format drawing on a fragile support, abstract and figurative painting, naivety and psychology, spontaneous brushwork and precisely constructed motifs, the act of seeing itself is reflected — both toward the image and toward one's own seeing — raising the question: how do we relate to these formative images?

The Jahresbilder proceed from the question of how the memory of time can become visible. What interests me is not the painting as the depiction of a single moment, but as a condensation of many perceptions, memories and painterly decisions. This is why these works come into being over the course of a year or longer.

Where the Spiegelbilder are concerned with the collective perception of time, the Jahresbilder deal with the subjective perception of change. Through the long process of painting, an indentation of presence emerges — like a thermal camera made of paint, recalling a past mood as though through fog — and with it the question of how our experience of the world is bound to our own perspective.