Grosse-Johannboecke Ben

The constant fight Ben finds myself in is between an autonomous, art-intrinsic practice and a politically engaged one. He is both living a life centred around painting and all its possibilities, and simultaneously, as all of us, some sort of witness of enormous trauma reaching us from areas of political conflict. His work previously investigated the relationship between art and music.

In his latest works, he takes earlier abstracted paintings, cut them into overlapping stripes digitally, and paint them again as if looking through corrugated glass. The original marks are repeated without being changed, and the distance between source and painting increases, begging the question of when an image removes itself from its origin and becomes autonomous. Various images and texts are transferred and silkscreened into the work; some are the reference image of the initial painting, some relate to music, some are recognisable, and others are not, blurring the lines between them.