covert and discovered history 131 - Emperor Franz Joseph in Ischler hunting suit - Limited Edition 19/50 Collage

Fragments get a new code. The best subversion is to disfigure codes instead of destroying them. see - Roland Barthes - In my artistic work I am talking about the ongoing change, connection and communication between the inner and outer worlds, and about the inevitable bond between art and human life in general. I feel drawn to the tension between opposites, the grey areas between black and white, the confusion and contemplation, stereotypes and prejudice. Décollages - ripped or lacerated posters - are part of everyday aesthetics. In their wildness, rejection can be deciphered - a manifestation of the spontaneous and direct expression. Artists like Raymond Hains and Jacques Villeglé recognized the quality of this un-conventional form of art. I try to transform this method into our contemporary digital age. I‘m currently working on a series of digital décollage and digital overpaintings titled „covert and discovered history“. Here I merge digitalized, famous single works of art history with my own photographs of anonymous, collective decollages, tags and urban fragments. In the melting pot of bits and bytes I liquefy the contrasting codes and add them together to a new whole. On the one hand you have the art historical artifacts of high culture from the past eras and on the other hand the wild, unbridled, credible expression, the codes, the inscriptions of the current visual grammar combined with my own paintings and writings. My aim is to connect those two antithetical approaches to art in my work and so create something utterly new.