STATEMENT

During the last two years I have been working on a series of large–scale ink wash drawings. These drawings are based on imagery of postwar architecture, which I find in historic architectural books and magazines from the 60s and 70s. I use both exterior and interior views, in which I want to examine the relationship between the architectural structure and its natural environment.

From the beginning the 'construction' of the drawing is essential to the whole project. In preparation of each drawing I create a composition of rectangular sheets of paper in different sizes and formats. This composition relates to both: to the content the appropriated image, and at the same time the formal play of the abstract composition of the paper. After I finalize the composition, I connect each sheet to the next with either vertical or horizontal pieces of transparent scotch tape.

Because the tape is applied before I begin with the drawing, it will leave white marks on top of the drawing: to look at the image I have to look through the tape, and through the paper composition. The buildings in my drawings are always new, I am looking back at this moment, when they where not yet or just inhabited. By drawing them now I bring this historic moment back into being—and yet through the fragmented composition and the tape this image wants to recede from the viewer. It is brought back into the presence in the most volatile and transient state of existence.

I find my images in libraries and used bookstores—it is a very intuitive process, in which I cannot ever predict its outcome. Post–war Germany was a very particular place, and some of my drawings try directly to trace back this environment in which I grew up. Other drawings represent more distant places, but ultimately the architecture relates back to this same moment in history. For example my drawing Ocean shows a raw and dark looking concrete high–rise structure, looming on top of cliff above the ocean. Though the environments suggest an exotic place, the architect is a European emigrant who found refuge from the Nazis in Australia, and who brought his particular vision of postwar modernity this remote place.

I see my drawings in many ways as portraits. The buildings often look at me like human figures that at the same time seem to both hide and reveal their inner lives. I see them also as portraits of the architects with their very particular historic experiences of emigration and their individual new beginnings after World War II. And finally these drawings are also portraying a particular time period. In my imagery of this time I find a particular atmosphere that interest me, maybe the feeling of soberness, of something absent or hidden. I am especially intrigued by the absence of history, I could call it a form of collective amnesia, which reverberates in these images.

March, 2007

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