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2005
drawing:installation
wall drawing, mixed media on paper
approx. 3 x 9 m
Galerie Eva Winkeler, Frankfurt / Main, DE
The installation of drawings at Galerie Eva Winkeler makes reference to the Wild Man, a notion that has recently come back to prominence in art circles in Berlin and beyond. Amid the ongoing revival of the eighties, the grand gesture, often a painter’s, is interesting again, an attempt to shake off the surfeit of reflection in the art of the nineties. The installation quotes the type of the Wild Man in the guise of a robber. The faces in the drawings are derived from found photographic originals, usually newspaper photographs. Based on the given facial features, a bearded, long-haired, unshaven, etc. version was created. In many works, the technique of such translation leaves its marks on the motifs of drawings, and on faces in particular; here, by contrast, a semantic distortion takes place that operates not with graphical parameters but with intrinsically figurative (social and psychological) ones. The robber’s faces generated in this fashion are integrated in an installational ensemble that alludes to protection against the wild as well as the form of the Wanted poster. The fence, which grew out of the scaffolds on which pictures are mounted or hanged, has here transitioned into the mode of illusion; it is realized as an imitation on paper. The outlines and depth of the wooden planks of a timber fence were drawn on large sheets of paper and filled in the color of wood; then frottage reproductions of the grain of the studio’s wooden floor on translucent tissue paper were pasted onto the outlines. Above the paper timber fence, which takes up the left-hand side of the gallery room, the wall was painted dark green in strong irregular brushstrokes. The fence, that is to say, blocks the path into an imaginary forest. Laminated onto this barrier are the drawings of robber’s faces, interspersed with grid drawings and sheets taken up by various versions of a malicious rolled R. Mounted on the facing wall are ten framed individual drawings of robbers.