Gallery Page 2

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Some early images, interrelated:

First I want to present a series of pictures wich were inspired by a painting by Giorgio de Chirico, “Hector and Andromache” (it is in Mailand, Collection Gianni Mattioli, 90 × 60 cm large and dates from 1917; for more informations about Hector and Andromache, see my “Einführung zu Homer”). This is one of my favorite pictures, and when I had, back in 1990 while visiting a friend, the occasion to use a computer with Microsoft Windows and Paintbrush for the first time in my life, I tried to draw something similar to de Chirico’s pictures. I wasn’t used to handle a mouse, and so my first drawing became raher crude, but I liked it and used it to produce about 50 computer paintings within a weekend. We printed them, and than we deleted them - I think only one two three survived as digital files. This took place from 1990-08-25 to 26.

After I returned back home, I used greaseproof paper to produce more of this stuff in an old fashioned way with pencils. Later I discovered that I could also use ordinary thin drawing paper instead of greaseproof paper. And so, on 1990-08-29, I redrew the computer picture of a de-Chirico-like warrior as a human made picture: (I called it “Normkrieger” [“Standard Warrior”], since it was the basic drawing). This was followed by a week of intense labour, while I produced literarely a hundred drawings: a deck of cards and a mechanical soldier called “ziro” (both 1990-08-29); “The White Rabbit” from Alice In Wonderland, “The Crimson King II” and a dominatrix named “Richter-Ist-Gott” (all of them 1990-08-30); “Richter-ist-Gott II (an-other one)” on 1990-08-31; a girl studying the “Mahayana” , two girls “26,5° östl. L. v. Gr./29° nördl. Br.” and a portrait of Zappa playing the “Wah-wah” -pedal (all 1990-09-01). Later I drew such things as a “linkshändige Geigerin” [“Left-handed Violonist”] (1990-09-03) or a “Botschafterin” [“Embassador”] (1990-09-08). Then, after a hundred pictures, it seemed to stop: from time to time, I drew another picture in that style, but it became less and less interesting.

The only exception was a picture I drew almost a year later, on the 1991-09-01. It was a collage showing a girl holding the head of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel . I liked the combination of the black background, the red hair, the red shirt and the trousers with red and white stripes, so I began to explore that picture.

One of the last “regular” picture in this series was “Echokardiogramm” from 1991-11-11 (I really made kardiogramms at that time).

One picture of the new serie was “Windhauch” , from 1992-03-11. It is again a collage, using six different types of paper, including marbled paper, greaseproof paper and a part of the jacket of a book (Spinoza, Ethics, to be explicit).

In most of the pictures of the first series, the people were holding something in their hands – the warrior holding a spear and so on. In this picture, I gave the girl with the striped trousers a cigarette (perhaps many people are smoking because they are faced with a similar problem: not knowing what to do with their hands). Unfortunatly, as a friend discovered, the girl is holding the cigarette in the wrong direction – as a non-smoker, I didn’t remark this error myself.

So I decided to use a living model for my next picture to avoid errors like this. I asked a friend who had recently colored her hair red if she could hold a cigarette and smoke while being barefoot. It looked like this: . The last two pictures are 42 × 30 cm in format, while all the previous picture were 30 × 21 cm. The last picture is from 1995-02-13.

The next two years, I did six rather large pictures; they are small compaired with the usual size of contemporary art, but large compared with the rest of my works. All of them are between 80 × 60 and 100 × 70 cm. Unfortunatly, I can’t show a good reproduction of any of them: I made photos of the pictures, and then scanned the photos, but the result is not very convincing. I hope you enjoy them nevertheless.

1992-08-13/19
1992-09-27/10-02 is ommitted.
1992-12-06 It wasn’t really made in one single day, but I only remember the day of finishing. This is the only oil-painting: the other five pictures are collage/drawings.
1993-02-22/03-06
1993-05-28/06-11 is ommitted.
1994-10-03 This too wasn’t made in one single day, but I forgot the exact dates.

You surely know Botticellis Venus (this here is a version probably made by a student of Botticelli, probably after a drawing of Botticelli himself. It can be found in Berlin, “Gemäldegalerie der Staatlichen Museen Preußischer Kulturbesitz”, 157 × 68 cm). I once decided to draw my one Birth of Venus. This is the first , and this is the third version (1994-12-02 resp. 1995-06-02, both 42 × 30 cm). As you can see, they are still influenced by the series of pictures that started with pictures trying to resemble Giorgio de Chiricos pictures, although they do not evocate Giorgio de Chiricos pictures themselves.

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25.8.1990 — 16.11.2009 · Jan Thor · www.janthor.de · jan@janthor.de