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Contemporary Art
process and set up, would tell us how do you select the subjects for your portrait series? The personalities, I selected for a painting, fascinated me somehow. Without that, the portrait would probably not be very „alive“, it would appear „constructed“. I really need that very personal thrill that drives me to paint them. And that can be a problem sometimes: Let us say, you have to paint somebody, for example by a comission. The main challenge is here, to get into a close connection, in order to develop some affection. And the best trick in order to achieve this, is to get engaged with the biography of the sitter. Did you ever read a boring biography? Probably not! So in case, you find a person really boring, and frankly, that happens sometimes on first sight, ask him about his life. And that is how I set up a creative process.With this little trick, it is impossible to paint boring people. Well, at least for me it worked. You are a versatile artist and your media include oil painting, mixed technique, collage and pastel: what are the qualities that you are searching for in the materials that you combine in your works?
Virginia Woolf's Death, Triptych acryl oil collage 2,40 x 1m
materials, no colours! Actually, I just used materials that were used by Beuys himself in his installations. For Beuys, materials had a special significance, e.g. every day used objects are „basic things“. Some things had a symbolic value like felt, fad or copper as energy source. So just using materials he used for that portrait collage, I figured maybe I could get closer to him and his broad art concept through the materials.
Well yes, I work with different materials: oil paints, acrylic, collages. Actually I work with everything you can glue on a paperboard or a canvas. Specially for collages, there is a wide range of useful qualities: the material itself, newspaper, tree bark, metals, potatoe nets etc. If you take a look for example at my Joseph Beuys-collage, you can see that I just used
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