"GRAVITATION 2" Painting

I am a photographic artist and the originator of Brain Art — work built on what neuroscience tells us about how images
take hold of us.
I do not photograph what the eye sees. I work from what cultural memory holds: motifs from media and consumer culture,
fragments of art history, historical allusions. These I put through a digital process of abstraction until the source motif is
no longer recognisable, and what remains is the perceptual residue — colour freed from the object it belonged to. The
images feel familiar before they are understood. That déjà-vu is the subject.
My concern is not that digital images can be manipulated. It is the power every image holds over the person looking at it,
and the unconscious assumptions we bring to the act of seeing. I work in series. Each one takes a single fault line of
contemporary life — political, social, technological — and builds an image world around it. The method is closer to a
controlled experiment than to intuition: one principle, fixed, applied again and again across different motifs.
The central result of this research was shown in 2005 at the Museum für Abgüsse Klassischer Bildwerke in Munich. Colour
Matrix was conceived with the museum’s director Ingeborg Kader, and Brian Eno created a sound installation in response
to the works. Its largest element, 256, was a 200 m² lightbox installation set into the museum’s glass roof — described in
the press at the time as the largest transparency in the world.
Born 1958 in Leningrad. Studied theatre and art history at the Academy of Theatre, Music and Film there, then ten years
in film production at Lenfilm. In Germany since 1988, living and working in Munich. Member of BFF and of the German
Photographic Association (DGPh).