I guess in my case the container as a metaphor makes sense, it's possible that I‘ve been using the term myself to describe what I‘m doing. I like it. From the beginning my interest in the Grateful Dead bear was this specific thing, solely targeted at the bear. Over the years I have collected a lot of information about the bear, but also The Grateful Dead and their cultural impact in general, because I was curious (still am) and want to know what I am working with in all its depth.
Me discovering the bear, then sticking with it, then not being able to get the same results due to a software update which led me to ultimately paint the bears myself, all these things happened organically and somehow randomly, by chance. Yet the process of painting the bears could indeed be described as mechanical, from the beginning on. I printed the first bear and then the next and then I kept doing that untilI painted the first bear and then the next and kept doing that. In that sense it’s a kind of a standard operating procedure; I know the materials I’m going to use and the motif is the same. I start with painting the outlines of one of the five variations of the marching Grateful Dead bears etc. To keep my mind busy I think about the bear a lot and the more I keep painting it, the more I think about the bears as paintings and therefore technique becomes more relevant. It is a development, of myself, my paintings and the bear. As the practice continues, the ways I work adapt.
It is my first time doing a solo presentation in Asia, yes. As I‘ve never been to Seoul before, I didn’t really know what to expect. But I guess even if I would have known, I have a tendency to stay close to myself and my own interests.
The aspect of contextual changes plays an important role in my work in general. Me not being American is one thing that matters. I didn’t grow up in USA with its history of pop art and appropriation. Another important fact is that it is not my bear, it’s an unofficial logo of The Grateful Dead. The time the GratefulDead bear first appeared was in the seventies. Me taking the bear out of the context of the band and the time it was embedded in by repeatedly painting it on canvas and exhibiting it to a certain extent shifts or distorts the meaning of the bear and how it is perceived.
Everything is constantly changing. I think this is one of the reasons why I like repetition so much; even though I am always the same person and the bear is always the same bear, every day I am a slightly different version of myself, depending on my mood, food intake, the quality of last nights sleep, the state of the world and so on. To know that on the next painting there will be another bear makes things easier. I still have to come up with a new version of the bear every time, as you say. As I continue working with the bear, painting it has to stay interesting for myself; I try to improve my technique and I always like to have something to think about. As I said earlier, it’s a development.
It’s true that I normally work on a larger scale. I like to get into the work physically, to lean into the bears with my whole body. To make smaller paintings was a challenge I’ve been dealing with since a while. In the end it had a technical and personal background; I broke my foot and could not stand for longer than a certain period of time. It was the perfect circumstance to finally face the challenge, to literally have to sit down and work through it.
There are two questions packed in here. You mentioning the frames makes me think of your first remark, of the bears being containers. Maybe the frames here can be seen as the containers of the bears. For a while, even after actually having started to paint them, I was not thinking of myself making paintings, but bears, so I didn’t see a reason to frame them. But as we discussed earlier, the work developed and by repeatedly painting the bears, the background of the paintings became a more central aspect of it and the act of painting became more central in my work. At one point my paintings depicted space (in a sort of a three dimensional but abstract sense). When I painted a few bears in studio spaces for an exhibition in Berlin last year, I decided to frame these spaces, it just made sense at that point. There were squares in the paintings, depicting doors, windows, ceilings, floors and wooden frame around these spaces seemed like a logical conclusion of these squares. That’s when I first started working with frames. For my exhibition Only one of us is real in Basel in June, I started to fit the frames more to the paintings. And for It’s not looking for you I matched colours of the frames with the paints I used for the single bears and switched them around a little. It is 16 bears, four different movements of marching, four colours I used for the paintings, four coloured frames, four trapezoidal frames etc. A modular set of building blocks to arrange and rearrange.
The second question regarding the number of paintings and the reference to the pawns of both players in a game of chess is just a very loose association of mine. I published a collection of chess poems to go with the exhibition and this alignment of quantity was meant solely as a little hint to the poems. So I guess to a certain extent I am referring to myself or my relationship with the bear. For a long time I had looked at our relationship as a classical subject-object relationship. When I started playing chess at some point last year, I started looking at the bear as its own subject; I started thinking about it asa partner or an opponent. Sometimes we work together, sometimes we work against each other.
This again is due to a personal background: my family and I have just moved fromBerlin to Basel and my studio in Berlin was already cleaned out, as my studio in Basel wasn’t set up. I could work in my friend’s gallery for the time being and had to buy new paint, brushes, and canvas. I bought a tube of zinc white, cadmium yellow and red and cobalt blue oil paint and that’s what I was working with (hence the four frames in the same colours). Having my colour palette reduced gave me the possibility to investigate what was possible within that frame(container). I tried to imitate watercolour paintings, still using oil and I developed a very fast technique, painting wet in wet (I normally paint on a painting over weeks or even months). I don’t think you really see that in the end results but I was thinking of flower paintings without flowers (there were a lot of flowers in the beginning that I erased during the course of painting these bears).
There are quite a few people who like the Grateful Dead who also like my work. I appreciate the exchange I have with most of them. One of my best real Deadhead friends is this guy @allmyhatsaredead who embroiders hats with Grateful Dead bears and other Grateful Dead insignia. I love his work. In case you are looking for a hat, I would highly recommend getting one of his. There are surprisingly many Deadheads in the art world, actually. Whenever I think I know them all, I am introduced to another one.
I did make four or five sweatshirts with Grateful Dead bears by now. They were all replicas of my paintings that I had translated to silk screen; one screen per colour, it was quite complicated to make, I was working with a graphic designer and a silk screen printer. It felt important that my bear sweaters were based on paintings of mine. This is something I really enjoyed doing and I think if I were asked to do something official I would totally do it.
