about

I live and work near of Berlin. After finishing art school in Munich at the beginning of the 1990s, I began a series of large-format pictures, partly as a retrospective of the past century. Photographs from old magazines served as image templates, books, including old engravings etc. The influence of professors Jörg Immendorff and Bernhard Johannes Blume, who both participated several times in Documenta, can be seen in the works. Immendorff’s work was very strongly politically motivated, in particular by the East-West Conflict and the Cold War prevalent at that time. His demand was that art should also be political; that it should take a stand. I was in his class for a year. B.J. Blume, on the other hand, was preoccupied with the spirit of the age, which he challenged in a quasi philosophical way, while also strongly emphasizing the gender issue, which was still new at the time. The auditorium of the academy was always full to bursting, including all the other professors, when he gave his lectures. However, he also proclaimed: “painting is dead”. He and the art philosophers at the time thought that everything had already been done in painting, that the styles had been exhausted, in fact since Malevich, so that now it could only be a matter of cheap imitations. The new art is digital. However, it made me want to paint even more to see what would happen, and that’s what I did, and still do today. I can’t say whether it makes sense from an art historical point of view or not. However, I actually stopped painting in the years 2000-2003 and worked with video on gender issues, but the works were hardly noticed, although they are actually highly topical from today’s perspective. Out of frustration, I finally started painting again and deliberately chose the stupidest motif of all, animal painting. But then very quickly realized that there was actually more to it, that the challenge lay solely in the subject, for example, to portray a horse in this image format in such a way that it actually looks like a horse. I found it much more difficult to depict a horse correctly, even if it was photorealism, than to depict people, which I had done in the 1990s pictures. You can’t simply pass over the difficult parts by blurring the color and hope that the viewer will interpret a meaning into it. A blurred hoof is no longer a hoof, without any interpretation. That’s how the subject of horses captivated me; it became an obsession, I was fascinated. The horse, in this large picture format: lively, sublime and beautiful, almost intoxicating. By the way: a comparable photograph of a horse would not have nearly the same effect. The small photos here are not an adequate reflection of the effect of the original pictures, the coat color on the original paintings changes depending on the light incidence or the time of day and where the picture is hanging, but these effects are well known in painting. Art is “disinterested pleasure”, say the art experts. Maybe so. But after a while I remembered Immendorff and his political agenda and have been using the horse pictures ever since as a means to an end, so to speak. That’s why I paint US horses, as a transatlantic art project. Of course, you can’t see anything of this in the pictures – you can think about it or simply ignore it. Then it is nothing but a picture of a horse, but it could still be an expression of the zeitgeist, which is currently trying to reorganize culture and nature