In the late 1980s, Groebel developed a machine that allowed him to transfer images from the television onto canvas, a complex process involving multiple stages and applications of paint with an airbrush pistol. Groebel’s production process played on a reciprocal and closely intertwined relationship between artist/painter, technology, and generative form-finding in an era of profound technological change and the digital turn. The paintings are based on what were ubiquitous images in the media of the time – simultaneously generic and highly suggestive – and have, as the artist himself says, “an effect, even when you don’t want them to.”

Groebel’s paintings offer a precise portrait of the televisual landscape of the 1990s and its specific mixture of voyeurism, reality TV, permanent self-staging, and surveillance. They convey a feeling for analog television’s hypnotic spaces of experience – its flickering, backlit, and low-resolution images, its abundance of talking heads and close-ups of bodies and body parts, and its transgressive intimacy. Where the Hollywood star on celluloid seemed unreachable, television projected a sense of familiarity and openness – a sort of seeing, speaking surface that looked out at us from within the device. His images have a mysterious physical presence and convey a powerful sense of psychological latency, bringing out the subtle tensions and power structures inherent within a gesture, a gaze, or the biting of nails, often contrary to the intrinsic and profit-driven agendas of the entertainment industry

Drei

Köln

Aachen

London

Frieze

Art Cologne

New York City

Petzel

Los Angeles

Bel Ami

Francis Irv

Paris

Freedman Fitzpatrick

Vienna

Galerie Emanuel Layr

Berlin

Schiefe Zähne

San Francisco

Haines Gallery

Zürich

Galerie Bernhard

Kölnischer Kunstverein

Bonn

Bonner Kunstverein

Singapore

Substation

Neuer Aachener Kunstverein

Düsseldorf

Kunstverein Für Die Rheinlande Und Westfalen

Matthias Groebel

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