About my IKONEN OHNE NAMEN-Series:

The series „Ikonen ohne Namen“ („Icons without names“) is based on mass media imagery. Photos of crises, catastrophes and human suffering, replacing each other in an endless succession. Seen today, and tomorrow- with the next hype- already pushed to the background again. Situations, which continue, but don’t have images anymore. Images, which seem so clear from a distance , but stay so blurred on a closer look, as most of the faces have no name. You see their condition, but you don’t see them. Floating impressions, shadows of reality, anonymous icons of incidents. 

My pixels mimic the visual language of digital media. However, where media uses pixelation to either shield or shame, I repurpose it as a mode of reference and critique to reflect the anonymity and abstraction imposed by mass media. And moreover, pixels are anonymity, but aren’t they as well like the countless facets of our world, the flood of informations, from which we have to form the picture of a reality beyond our personal experience?

To work on this series is intriguing. Like walking a thin line between figurative and abstract. Sometimes I don’t care, where I end up, but most works finally merge both: viewed from a distance, the figurative is present, but dissolves by approaching into abstraction- countless pixels, each with its very own information.

About my FADING LIFE-Series:

Extinction of species is a natural process, but recent estimations of the WWF state, that the man-made extinction rate exceeds the natural one by 100-1000 times. On the international Red List of the IUCN (International Union for the Conservation of Nature), from 143.000 listet species ~ 40.000 species are endangered in various grades (in 2021).  In addition, from an estimated 8-10 million species on earth there are only 2 million scientifically known and thus visible.  

With my Fading Life series I wanted to give those dry numbers a face: 40 paintings for 40.000 species listed as globally endangered. 

The motifs of the acrylic paintings are rendered in opaque layers of color, whereafter a translucent layer of paint is applied to the canvas, partially shading the motif.  

The degree of the threat  is shown by the width of the shading screen: 

VU  =vulnerable                                 

EN  =endangered 

CR  =critically endangered               

EW =extinct in the wild 

The color of the screen shows the  cause of the threat: 

RED           = fire                                     

PURPLE  = pollution                             

BLUE        = industry expansion 

BROWN = trade, poaching                                   

GREEN    = invasive species 

YELLOW= habitat loss