Unstable paintings for a controlled environment

The imagery of Unstable Paintings for a Controlled Environment is carefully chosen to enhance tainted German cultural ideas and their troublesome representations, expanding on my personal fascinations with taboos and history, and with memory and experience. In one work, a Hochsitz (a raised, covered structure used for observing or hunting animals) standing in a crowded forest as dense as an Albrecht Dürer woodcut or a Gustav Mahler musical composition, ominously connotes a military lookout post. In another image, a double eagle that ornately decorates a mirror offers a reflection on historical German symbolism as well as the country’s immediate postwar past. Pictures of turbulent cloudscapes and distant castles on rocky hills above craggy branches and barren landscapes draw attention to sublime experiences and their historical baggage. The images were drawn on paper with gouache, before being screen-printed onto unprimed canvases with transparent ink. I then blew a luminescent powdered pigment across the surface of the wet ink, resulting in a mute beige-yellow surface. Barely perceptible in the light, the images become recognisable as the gallery darkens, triggered by the UV lamps, producing unstable notions of positive and negative in the German historical context.