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A painting develops from a collection of various images, fragments, „set pieces“ from different sources like art history or the media for example or from personal background.
Some elements appear alienated, distorted, mirrored in several paintings. Within a work I use duplication as a technique that often becomes apparent on second glance.
An seeming authenticity reveals itself as self-referential artificiality or as quotation. The impression of liveness is fiction- a synthetically produced effect.

In my paintings I mostly deal with portraits.
The world of appearance is a continual issue both in my paintings and in my drawings. I am interested in the relation of the object (image) to its likeness ('Bild' and 'Abbild'). An attempt on painting an image (portrait) which cannot be retraced to its origin by matters of resemblance, like resolving the relations of likeness. What is likeness?
Reproduction and multiplication (duplication) are central in my work, sceneries are staged, “are built” out of a construction kit.

My large-sized drawings are drawn with eraser on graphite. You could describe them also as „negative-drawings“. Graphite in the form of pencil strokes as the material of a black surface, the eraser as a engraving milling machine. The visible is removed, deleted, erased. Feathers, threads, fabric, drapes and spaces are uncovered among the pencil strokes overdrawing and covering the paper as compact texture, developing a second level of perception. What is in the front, what is in the background. The foreground and the background are like layers mutually lying on top of each other.

What stands behind the visible reality.
The linking of fragments is a strategy of filling vacancy: for instance, when recalling the past, processing events in dreams or tinkering ideals by connecting fragments that are available and seem the most appropriate.
Nevertheless vacancies and imperfection are unavoidable, containing and hiding the peculiar, absurdities and strangeness. Illusions and visions as well as uncertainty and deception.

“True” or “artificial”, “real” or “imaginary” (may be made up and distorted like in a dream or in a fairy tale): The even blackness of the pencil-strokes develops a surface which conceals and uncovers at the same time, which may seem threatening in its objecthood, but at the same time seducing like a phantom that draws into the black like into and towards a beauty.

2012