HISTORY IS NOW

History, despite it's wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.

MY HE-ART

I call myself a ”documentarist”. I’ve spent over thirty years of my life on painting and making collage based on original newspaper clippings with apocalyptic headlines, and fetishistic memorabilia from the 20th century. My idea was to build the backbone of my art form on the iconized images of people and events, fragments of the written word and sound and video elements that give direct links to the historical episodes.

Going through the vault of information of our collective memory, we find our self, naked in front of the magnitude of both glorious and shameful achievements of mankind.

I try as an artist and an observer to express the frustration of the little man, tossed around the arena of indifference. My art seeks to state the complexity and persity of the 20th century history. The struggle of an inpidual among frictions between different ideas, wars, and revolutions and religious and political believes.

In this competitive landscape where giant industries like wild animals tear each other apart, and nations try to improve their world markets through wars and ruthless mismanagement of the natural resources of our planet, I feel the duty of an artist to reflect my time.

This fascination for history brought me, in 1989 to the iron curtain, where I was one of the artists painting on and documenting the Berlin Wall. The same anxiety has been a reason of working with the images of different totalitarian regimes, the tragedy of the holocaust, unsolved mysteries (like the assassinations of J.F.K., Marilyn Monroe and Princess Diana etc) or turning points like landing on the moon or invention of the first atomic bomb.

My visual language is often brutally direct, sometimes violent, but always with a humanistic approach. One of my greatest masters and inspirations has been John Heartfield. He had the courage to mock the Nazis through his art using irony and humor as his tools.

I do not try to explore the spectra of artistic colors, nor the density between different materials or surfaces, and I find no interest in playing with perspective or form. My passion lays in a total different artistic expression -my fascination for the playfulness within trends and “isms”, and the gap between fame and misfortune. Although my art often takes a recognizable form, it never strives to copy- to the contrary. After the first impression when coming across any of my works, you will find a playful and intellectual dialog with different artists and art movements of the past. By using a well-known language of expression I bridge the familiar of the past with unknown of the present.