topics

Animals

Animals are linked to cultural memory and represent the schizophrenia of humans in relation to nature. On the one hand, the animal stands as a lower species: bred, used, consumed, consumed, trained and killed; on the other hand, there is an icon: friend, protector, saviour, comforter, symbol, dream image, alter ego.

What people reveal about themselves in their dealings with animals reveals how they feel about themselves and their fellow human beings. The animal as a victim of power, discipline, optimisation and a love of fear that is incalculable from a psychological point of view is an inexhaustible source for me artistically, as I find in animal figures, modes of locomotion and myths visual models that lend a visual, sensual language to human suffering, above all the suffering of ourselves. At the same time, animals represent beauty, strength and spirituality. For humans, animals are spiritual companions, signposts and symbols of protection. We seek their closeness and affection.

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.

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.