The artwork consists of four square images depicting various parts of the human body, including a close-up of a face with droplets of water, a figure reclining, and hands. The overall composition is fragmented, with a distinct focus on the physicality and intimacy of the subjects. The muted color palette and blurred, distorted quality suggest an introspective, psychological tone. The text references suggest a narrative or thematic exploration of "terror" and "the towers", evoking a sense of unease and potential social commentary. The artwork appears to employ a contemporary photographic style that challenges conventional representation, inviting the viewer to ponder the deeper meanings and contexts behind the depicted scenes. ...
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.
