It could be said that it started
this way, in the life sculpture class, led by the chance of a day-time job as
an art model. Sitting on the floor, the head bowed to the stomach, I considered the folded space. This field of vision was purely composed of skin, and yet
foreign, disembodied.
As time was passing, I gradually lost sense of scale. This surface appeared huge, boundless, earthly. On it, hairs were moving to accordance to my breath, and in reaction to the draughts, like leaves of grass in the meadow. I could detail each of these hairs in their tininess.
Meanwhile, there remained this human urge, the need to proportion the world to my vision and body. In short: there was the desire to make a landscape from the formlessness I saw.
Finding the proper scale for this image took me a long time, until I came across a formula permitting to calculate the surface of the skin of a human body, as its weight and size are known. So I started a drawing, a 1,6549 m² landscape. However proportionate, the surface felt much bigger than me. Drawing became immersive – just as posing was.
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Calculations, graduation installation at the Royal Academy (detail), white liner on floor, 2018
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When Everyone Is Gone, performance without public at the Wackers Academie, 2018
As time was passing, I gradually lost sense of scale. This surface appeared huge, boundless, earthly. On it, hairs were moving to accordance to my breath, and in reaction to the draughts, like leaves of grass in the meadow. I could detail each of these hairs in their tininess.
Meanwhile, there remained this human urge, the need to proportion the world to my vision and body. In short: there was the desire to make a landscape from the formlessness I saw.
Finding the proper scale for this image took me a long time, until I came across a formula permitting to calculate the surface of the skin of a human body, as its weight and size are known. So I started a drawing, a 1,6549 m² landscape. However proportionate, the surface felt much bigger than me. Drawing became immersive – just as posing was.
Close kins and dunes, series of photographs from my own family archive, ca. 1950
(I found these family pictures while completing the drawing, and recognised in the left photograph the same composition as the image I was working on. Perhaps these people were also trying to stage the continuity between themselves and their direct surroundings.)
(I found these family pictures while completing the drawing, and recognised in the left photograph the same composition as the image I was working on. Perhaps these people were also trying to stage the continuity between themselves and their direct surroundings.)