ARTIST STATEMENT

How to best visualize the questions that arise whilst searching for a meaning in life? Thus enabling others as well as myself to actually envision them. Which techniques and areas of projection are suitable to convey those questions that are of lasting importance to me — and possibly to others? Which paths of exploration and decoding could I chose in my search for answers – and which paths of decryption do I offer the viewers of my works?

Anyone who is grappling with current events as a subject in their art has to find his or her own answers to those questions. And as our modern world has become ever more complex, there is a tendency to simplify, as it would result in a whac-a-mole, if we attempted to understand and explain all its details. Nonetheless, I am trying to bear that challenge every day. Luckily, the effort is not in vain, for it yields inspiration and fresh ideas that sublimate and take shape in my paintings.

In preliminary studies and during the actual process of painting, those sublimates are first bopping up as fragments, which can be very heterogeneous. At first glance, they might not even fit together. This contradiction, however, slowly but surely disappears. Gradually, the boundaries between the fragments are beginning to blur. And what initially appeared to be incongruous either becomes harmonious – or the independent fragments are strong enough to assert their position alongside each other, thus forming subtle structures of communication.

All these fragments are hints. Viewers can use those messages and try to find answers in themselves to questions that may come up while they are viewing the works. The fragments — information bits of low complexity — are transmitted to the recipients through the painting as a medium, with me, the artist, being the originator.

Fundamental issues, such as life and death, eros and austerity, love and hate, are important subjects in my works. To fathom them and to use them in order to create a visual room that serves as a place of experience, strongly fascinates me. Albeit, the creative process turns out to be a struggle that serves the purpose to find out which assumptions and claims that were initially made, will persist or disappear – or if any of these could possibly be combined, and how that combination could take place. The painting, in any case, is only completed when this struggle is over.