Zu verkaufen (for sale)

2019

Tomas Absolon and Kate Steciw

Gaze upon a painting and feel what you could never feel. See what you could never imagine or just get bored. Every five years an idiot tells us that the painting is dead. Whatever, we still have photography, you say, even though you feel the anxiety of an image-less world. But everything has become an image anyway and people still love paintings. Don't you like things that can be bought, sold and hung on a wall? Everything here is “zu verkaufen” (for sale).

Everything here is “zu verkaufen“ (for sale).

Outside the galleries people don’t care if painting or even photography is dead.

Because to paint is to be human, someone said once.

And capturing an image has become a daily habit.

The world is filled with millions of images and the Internet has become our source.

You can blame it on the current socio and economic climate, that tuned in to themes of surveillance and constant documentation. Images are useful. Artists use photography’s to paint pictures and paintings are being photographed. And don’t we love the human form?

We still are searching for the right, a different or even a new way to detect it.

Even though art has become more digital, we continue to paint and take photos.

Tomas Absolon is an artist who translates aspects of graphic design, symbols and typography in the medium of painting. Inspired by their form, shape and content, he paints precise lines and curves with minimal use of color. A few brush strokes create an abstract and ironical work, technically almost similar to a digital image, while we are still dealing with a painting.

The work of Artist Kate Steciw explores the symbiotic relationships between image, object and digital representation. Photographs and images are taken from the internet to be re-processed. By editing, layering and rearranging digital files, her work becomes sculptural and is blurring the line between representation and abstraction.

Tomás Absolon (Czech, 1987) lives and works in Mallorca.

Kate Steciw (Pennsylvania, 1978) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

– Alexandra-Maria Toth