acrylic on canvas (computer-assisted painting)Drei
Description
Human-crafted. AI-refined.
The artwork presents a black-and-white abstract composition featuring murky, amorphous shapes and patterns. The overall visual effect is one of blurred, dreamlike ambiguity, with a sense of depth and movement across the frame. The technique appears to be a photographic process, potentially using experimental darkroom techniques to create the moody, atmospheric quality. This abstract, evocative work likely reflects the artist's intention to evoke a sense of mystery and the subconscious through the unconventional visual language. ...
Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble, and he delivered them from their distress. He brought them out of darkness and the shadow of death, and burst their bonds apart, 2023
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 ...
Emerging out of a former project space, Drei has been established as a commercial gallery in 2015 by Dennis Hochköppeler and Jakob Pürling in Cologne, Germany. The gallery features an international and trans-generational program with a focus on cross-disciplinary practices and pushes the cooperation with international galleries and institutions.