Remove the Water from the Bottom of the Ocean // 2018
at wasserwasser

My paintings are a continuous exploration of what landscape painting is and can be. I like to show the landscape as a body made up of tissues that are connected like organs by tendons, tubes, veins and arteries. By opening them, by dissecting them I wanted to show the inner workings of these bodies. By cutting the skin, lifting membranes and looking underneath one can discover new worlds below. And one can remove things to examine them more closely. For this exhibition I removed and isolated the water. Using the tools of surrealism I examined it by playing with its physical properties, by seeing it’s surface as a skin or by ignoring its liquid nature.

John Berger once said that oil painting was invented to render the physical texture of things. He suggests that in that sense it is a by-product of capitalism. With this in mind I wanted to render the physical texture of water, giving the most natural things the texture of plastic. This causes the subjects of my paintings to be uneasily trapped not only between the real and the unreal but between the natural and the unnatural.

Above all I would like this exhibition to be an invitation to an investigative perception, an invitation to look deep inside and see living creatures not as individuals but more as irreplaceable organs within working, living systems.