"Casino Van Gogh" Print

ARTIST STATEMENT__________________________ To know if he created art, the artist has to come out of the process of creation - liberated from himself (or his Self). Therefore it is not a brush, hand or eye that the artist works with – but internal freedom. We have boxed everything into categories and have names for everything: painting, drawing, portrait, abstract, this - that. It works well for search engines and our convenience. But the deep urge of creativity comes in a formless force of creation. Breathe it into any form and there it is. It may be a meal, a canvas or a dance. What you can touch or experience is called "the work" of art, but "the art" is the inner experience of the creator in a given moment in which it manifests something into existence. Thus, what we can see or touch, is not the art itself. It is the work, a surface that bears the traces of that inner experience. It is all about the inner experience. And the purpose of having any work is that the work hopefully can in some way trigger in the viewer an experience of the same quality or kind. BIOGRAPHY________________________________ I was born in a family of two artists, who had their studios right next to each other, separated with one internal door. My early childhood passed by crawling on the floor from my father's studio which looked like a museum with all the sculptures and masks, paintings and wooden carvings that he had displayed all around, to my mother's studio, which was another magical world full of embroideries, crocket woven lamps, fabric collages and dolls made out of beads handing from all over the place. I started paintings and getting involved with materials around the age of 3 and later in adolescence, I went to take up acting, music, then science and from college onwards I made a large U-turn through various disciplines of sociology, economics, philosophy and marketing, receiving scholarships and travelling around the world. In 2009 I happened to land in Berlin, where I had the fortune to once again re-enter the world of art for myself. It was a fantastic one year of art and philosophy education at European College of Liberal Arts (now ECLA Bard). I spent that year there mainly concentrated on creating installations, sculptures and what not in my studio as part of the Advanced Studio Art class under the supervision of international artist, David Levine. That year I also did an internship with another NYC/ Berlin based artist, John von Bergen.