themes

My approach is to view intuitive artistic practice as a space and process for embodying and reinterpreting cultural conventions, social norms, and individual fulfillment. My paintings create spaces in which fundamental themes such as longing, fear, violence, love, and memory can be sensed and reflected upon. They emerge from the emotional impact of color and the visual impulses released during the artistic process. Inspired by philosophy and psychology, the figurative compositions that emerge in this process are experimental transformations of topoi and role models.

Animals

Animals are part of our cultural memory and embody humanity’s contradictory relationship with nature. On the one hand, they are seen as a lower species: bred, disciplined, and consumed as food; on the other hand, they serve as friends, protectors, sources of comfort, and symbols. This duality is embedded in all my animal motifs; they hold up a mirror to human themes and provide humans with an alter ego. What people reveal about themselves in their interaction with animals shows how they relate to themselves and their fellow humans — in a balance between discipline, optimization, and rationalism on the one hand, and beauty, power, and spirituality on the other.

Wounds

When a wound is inflicted, it has to be treated and healed, scabs are formed that fall off, and scabs are formed again, allowing new skin to grow. I work on my paintings in a similar way: I build surfaces and make wounds in them, mould figures and damage them with solvents or mechanical influences. What is still there at the end has survived, what has not, has left traces behind when it disappears. The result is an object with depth that tells stories. Since 2023, shellac and ash have become important to me alongside oil paint in order to physically represent the experience of time and historicity. I want my paintings to come close to the impression of a life lived, like archaeological artefacts that have been around for as long as the human themes they deal with.

Wunschmaschinen

Wunschmaschinen = machines désirante = desire machines, coined by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari for the idea of a productive unconscious machine (see Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia I)

In contrast to Freud, the father of theories about the unconscious, Deleuze and Guattari reject the idea that the unconscious is purely psychic, i.e. hidden somewhere in our heads. Instead, for them it is already present in all technical and social processes. The social and cultural world in which we live is always also the world in which our unconscious takes place or in which it also plays a formative role, i.e. how we perceive things or what feelings they trigger in us.

The reference to Deleuze and Guattari's ‘desiring machines’ concept is in a way a (self-) criticism of categorisations such as female vs. male or animalistic (animal) vs. cultivated (human) - themes that appear again and again in my paintings. If one reads societies as a complex coexistence of ‘desiring machines’, relations such as cause and effect, perpetrator and victim, ruler and ruled, rich and poor, discriminator and discriminated against lose their unambiguousness. Hierarchical thinking loses its footing and everyone is in the same boat, so to speak.