Cowboys The Bad/Canyon (7), 2011, pencil, magazine, digital photo print on paper, 50 x 70 cm
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Myths and icons of our everyday culture are the subject of my work and become part of a fictitious strategy whose theme is the worldwide omnipresent struggle for power of definition. The former, largely detached from their religious origins and seemingly unbroken, exert an enormous attraction and develop an often astonishing life of their own. More or less each of us uses these traditional means and creates for example a "cult place" for his football idols, pop icons, or even the "Ancestor Gallery". This becomes visible above all in the eternal game of picking up, occupying and recreating, which has conquered almost all areas of public and private life with advertising and thus also sets in motion a process of permanent reversals.
The resulting overlaps and mixes lead to placing things in a different context and giving them a new, very individual meaning. This endless process of reversal, which moves in a constant field of tension between absurdity and holy seriousness, offers not only a certain comedy, but also infinite possibilities for playing along, which must be exploited at all costs:
Things that I encounter in everyday life (the real, as well as images, films, etc.) become actors of a very personal mythology. The result is a self-contained system in which everything found can be inserted at will. The process of appropriation is of decisive importance. The multiple reversal described above is just as important, both on the content level and on the formal level.
Which first leads to two crucial questions: does a myth live through me, or I live through it - and then who is real? And: is everything only true/perceived through the individual, i.e. emotional possession of collective associations?
Starting from the fact that I answer the first question in my favour and the second question with "yes", I use the means to create myths and icons of our everyday culture and develop various forms of medial implementation that take advantage of the abolition of borders and lend the nimbus of general validity to the set pieces of my private mythology.