HANGOVER
2003

drawing:installation
wall drawing, ink on paper 
27 drawings, 70 x 55 cm each
  
The Seattle Arts Festival, Seattle, US





This installation with portrait drawings was produced for the exhibition The Last Judgement Project , which was curated by Stefano Catalani on the occasion of the Seattle Arts Festival. With the title hangover the work opposes the pathos of the exhibition title, that echoes the „apocalyptical“ experience of 9/11, by putting forth the motif of immediate pain and punishment the day after a dringking night. All the portraits are based on photographs of friends, that were altered on the computer, enlarged with a copy machine and executed in the resulting size in black ink. The sharply overexposed imagery and the reduction to black and white which comes from the technically generated model becomes more pointed through the translation into an ink drawing. The harsh light on the faces cite a court or interrogation situation, a well-known clichee of many movies. Mixed into this is the familiar experience of glancing into the first light of day at the painful awakening of a hangover. Each drawing is compiled of the common A4 copy format, whose white paper borders are also often translated into the final drawing. For that reason, half of the drawings appear with what seems to be a target mark. For the installation two right-angled walls were painted black. The 27 drawings are fixed with white tape on the upper rim and hung in 3 rows. The title hangover finds a resonance in this hanging order.