Arnolfini - Limited Edition of 1 Photograph

Life is art. Art is my life. noró The eccentric Art Brut artist, Norbert Tappert by his own name, was born on November 2 as the son of the Ruthenian inventor Nikola Tappert (Tappertuum Mobile) and the Tatar princess Maria, daughter of Khan Topolanchin. He received his first camera - ETJUD - at the age of three, and this predetermined his future direction. He spent his childhood in eastern Slovakia, mostly in Košice, where in the late nineties he devoted himself to performances. Around the same time he began to devote himself to artistic photography and its computer mutations and exhibited in Poprad, Košice and Bratislava. Subsequently, with his peers, director Gejz Dezorz and writer Agda Bavi Pain, he founded the so-called Ignorant Generation. "We disagree! We don't pay attention! We don't know!" read their Manifesto. In 2000, he moved to Prague, where for a decade he lost himself in the world of commercial visual production, and in himself. "I have been and will be Ignorant. I live exclusively in my own world. Twice I have photographed death, but I have survived. I need to create!" In 2015, he exhibited a set of over 35 large-format colour photographs from his extraordinary world at the Central-european House of Photography in Bratislava. The curator of the exhibition, the well-known photographer Peter Župník, says of the exhibition, "NORBIS PICTUS draws us into an artistic feria; we wander through an intimate story of sexuality, attraction and animality." He continues, "The invisible line where we can slip into vulgar perversion is constantly shifting and changing. Tappert moves along it with the knowledge of a smuggler, going no further than necessary." The artist himself admits that the photographs are a search for the boundaries between aesthetics and pornography. The absence of light that emphasizes the intimacy of human body parts, the omnipresent eyes as a symbol of voyeurism, the obscure self-portraits - these are the series of photographs in the exhibition, entitled The First Cum, In Nořík's Vision and Remorse from Consciousness. The identity of the author - Norbert Tappert - is no coincidence. The photographer changed his name after the famous detective. He decided to do so during the course of his life, which he conceives as one continuous artistic project.