Bathroom 1 Print

"Friederike & Uwe" are two artists who have been working together as a collaborative duo since 1994. After a few years of having been into "Kitsch Art" with all its facets (photography, objects, video, performance etc. - also see the "Friederike & Uwe"-book), the artists discovered the mosaic technique in combination with modern computer technology as their picture medium. Since 1998/9 "Friederike & Uwe's" common work has focused on mosaics made of the children's jigsaw "ministeck" and various other plastic materials, like, for instance, plastic lids of soft drink bottles, plastic sticks and plastic plotter foil. For their pieces of work, the artists create - with the help of image editing programmes - exact drafts on computers out of digitalized pictures. The drafts are turned into analogue mosaic artwork by filigree handcraft. Friederike & Uwe do not primarily intend to just turn pictures into mosaics, but their main intention is the exploration of the pixel structures under various conditions. Moreover, the artists examine the technique and the material `plastic´ with regards to content. Certainly, questions of colour design and composition play as big a role as in painting. Motives by "Friederike & Uwe" deal with current topics between idyll and violence ("Tulips and Terror" the SZ newspaper wrote): Diffuse general respectively common memory of their generation, more or less meaningful irrelevance or moments of life, war as entertainment, blood as an aesthetic "Computer game still life". For the duo it is all about medially transferred realities, about the reference between content and surface, about the relationship between art, artificiality and life. The indistinguishability in places, the smooth transition of virtuality and reality is of great interest for them - life as a simulation. Doing so, "Friederike & Uwe" do not want to be ill-humoured. On the one hand, they try to keep an ironic (self-)distance, on the other hand, they use their motives as a kind of last weapon in their fight against the absurdity of existence, against resignation and helplessness. The material `plastic´, which "Friederike & Uwe" work with nearly exclusively, is here a symbol of permanent availability, of superabundance, imperishability and unpretentiousness, but also a symbol of clotted artificiality, of the colourful world of plastic which has surrounded us all for long.