The artwork depicts a close-up portrait of a young woman with striking blue eyes and blonde hair. The colors are muted, lending a vintage feel to the image. The composition focuses intently on the subject's face, creating an intimate and contemplative mood. The text "Instant Relief" overlaid on the image adds a layer of irony or commentary, potentially alluding to the human experience of seeking solace or respite. The overall style and technique suggest a collage or mixed media approach, blending photographic realism with textual elements. This thought-provoking piece may reflect on the fleeting nature of emotional relief or the complexities of the human condition. ...
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.
