written paper

At the beginning of the course I was very much into painting

portraits - mostly black and white - of people, that are often overseen,

such as tramps and alcoholics, but in my opinion had very

interesting faces. I encountered them randomly on the streets,

asked to photograph them, then I painted them on a large scale in

the majority of cases - celebrating the uncelebrated.

Within the course I started to question scale, experimented with

different formats, played with colouring, but I kept on working

with random encounters - not only in the context of humans, but

also objects and street-scenes (CCTV), and lastly with images

I found on the internet. I began to get more and more interested

in the gap between the actual, visual content of an image, and

the social context that it was being made in. I got very interested

in the manipulative nature of images, and how they change our

perception of facts. I started deliberately misleading the viewer

and tried to misdirect the interpretation of the observer within

a painting. The source of the image and the actual context is

disguised through my selection process, which only shows a

fragment of the whole story. So the viewer starts to build his own

subjective story of the painting, which is dependent on his very

own perception and experience.

Later on, I started to include the fake subject matter in my work.

I became interested in imagery and myths that arose with the

support and „proof “ of fake imagery. My own experimentation

with faking photographs (without the help of photoshop) helped

me understand how easy it is to form content that misleads the

viewer. The painting of fake images adds another layer of fakeness

to it. Painting is less believable than photos, even in times of photoshop

we tend to believe what we see in photos, as photography

has a much more objective character than painting, where every

stroke is human-made, thereby subjective and not reliable. At the

moment I play with these properties of painting, adding simple

almost naive marks as ufo´s, ghosts etc. . This added humour and a

certain ridiculousness to my work that it did not contain before. I

make fun of the paintings inability to be valid as a proof, but at the

same time questioning the reliability of images in general.

After the course I´m planning to make a series which adapts the

visual language of -missing- posters, and insert my own ridiculous

content, such as a devised animal (lion, octopus, or a mixture of

both...), or maybe even just a simple painting mark, that is being

interpreted by the viewer.

I want to do further work on the hoax-character of my more recent

creations, maybe also with mixing silkscreen and painting.