NO WAY / woodcut / - Limited Edition 4 of 50 Print

I was born 9 years before the fall of the Berlin wall. I discovered the industrial revolution under the red star. I grew up under the fixing gazes of the communist party secretaries. The world beyond the wall was a dream, a consumer society which one could imagine by looking at the Neckermann catalogues. Linocuts were used for political propaganda, this is why I chose the high-relief technique – linocuts, woodcuts. I am interested in the absorption capabilities of black, in the creation of signs, of symbols. I am actively looking to perceive the invisible and to sink into shadows. Significant sign, meaningful symbol, limited visible images which expose a feminine body – a window mannequin, rejected, used, vain, useless, in the middle of abandoned industrial buildings resembling empty exoskeletons. A past life spent waiting, hoping that the New Man will finally come to being, illusions and devious wanderings, detached from reality, absorbed by a curious dementia that metamorphosis itself into a gridlock, into a tunnel without an end in sight resembling an air chamber, with no entrance and no exit, with no birth and no death. Obsessed lives, used and devoid of meaning; hypocrisy, insatiability and eternity, swallowed by the shadows of railway stations and underground passages; closed spaces, ancient factories, identical windows, a sea of roofs and chimneys, monotonous horizons, a repetitive rhythm, infinite Kraftwerk. I’m searching for meaning far away from our collective gaze, hidden under the shadow of industrial monuments and the problems of the post-industrial societies; disconnection from nature, inherited restlessness, confusion, extremity, transition, terminus. I see the Man, the Human, an abandoned spirit, anxious, oppressed, crushed, wounded, vain, rejected, feeble, defenceless, fallen, lost, unreal – both Object and Subject, having spent an existence using, destroying, throwing, dispossessing, disdaining. Reason tames the spirit. Art transforms itself into an art projection, which functions as utilitarian art and becomes an art of rationality, of administration, of power. In my work, I am searching for these infinitesimal and unconscious particles that light the spirit, in those places where reason becomes a simple witness.