”Fortschritt”
2024
Fortschritt 1883
153 x 55 cm
Fortschritt 1924
151 x 54 cm
Fortschritt 1911
146 x 64 cm
Fortschritt 1920
134 x 60 cm
Fortschritt 1907
130 x 57 cm
Fortschritt 1865
113 x 58 cm
Fortschritt 1891
110 x 61 cm
Fortschritt 1877
77 x 63 cm
Fortschritt 1902
63 x 49 cm
materials:
oil paint, chalk primer, old burlap bag, spruce wood
The starting point of the "Fortschritt" (“progress”) series was the vision of creating works that combine the materials and production methods of the past with the abstraction of modernity. This meant using only materials that had also been used by artists of the 18th and 19th centuries – at the dawn of industrialisation and mechanisation in the Western world.
Over several months, the artist acquired and collected old burlap bags that had to be at least 100 years old. They came from old mills and fruit farms, mostly from southern Germany.
He stretched them onto spruce wood frames and used the actual back side as a painting surface. He created a completely natural chalk primer (ital. gesso) from Rügen chalk, the pigment zinc white, rabbit hide glue, and alum, deliberately without any non-natural additives.
For the actual motifs, he used black oil paint, which he made from ground charcoal and linseed oil—again, completely natural, without additives such as solvents, preservatives, or drying accelerators.
The charcoal alludes to the 18th and 19th centuries—a time whose progress was largely driven by the use of coal-fired furnaces.
The deliberately thick application of gesso created a relief effect, highlighting the centuries-old wear and tear on the burlap bags.
The plastered traces of time now served as a friction surface for the black oil paint applied in one go.
This resulted in unique works—depending on the degree of wear and tear on the burlap bags. Their surface is not flat like conventional paintings, but raised and irregular, particularly in the bulging areas at the bottom—where the main weight of the bag was sitting. Thus, the works became a hybrid of painting and sculpture.
The title, production method, and materials of the series allude to a bygone era, whose spirit, however, lives on today:
the spirit of higher, faster, further, of excess, of a lack of reflection, of the exploitation of the working class, of progress as a fetish and at the expense of nature—with the simultaneous loss of any naturalness.
On a purely visual level, the individual motifs can be interpreted as raining ash—the harvest of our industrial seed.