Series of pencil drawings, 2015–2019
Last presented as part of the group exhibition Maskulinitäten at Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf, 1 September–24 November 2019.
Titles from top to bottom:
Boy faiences: desk set and creamer, 2016
Teenage faience with hidden handkerchief box and mother bringing school clothes for the next day, 2016
Reading country boy with cream and milking mother, 2016
Gong Narcissus (detail), 2019
The drawn male figures, often melancholic diary writers, are practicing fascinated introspection. In most cases, the pose before the actual act of writing solidifies and becomes eternal. Almost all of them are resting on their stomach, a position which marks a kind of prestage to the lateral position of the mature poet. At closer inspection, many of the young men prove to be objects: they are fictitious ceramics. The writing, reading or thinking man who is at the same time a vessel, amounts to an objectification of male subjectivity. Some of the lads who are creamers or ink jars present very reduced legs which make them appear stuck in a larval stage. The reappearing form of the cornucopia suggests a confusing identity of the vaginal and the phallic. The drawings transport a state of serene undefinedness, which is protected by spoiling mothers who provide the boys with milk or clothes for the next day at school. The works combine theatrical elements with influences from the world of comics as well as the compositional strategies and the meticulousness of still life tradition. Some of the arrangements are reminiscent of Piranesi’s etchings of antique artefacts.