Mihai Grecu (Video) · Dirk Eicken (Paintings)
10 November 2014 – 31 January 2015
In what form can art take a stance on socio-political events?
Mihai Grecu and Dirk Eicken do so in different ways.
Mihai Grecu, born in 1981 in Romania into a system of political repression, has created a dense video work from the combination of violence experienced firsthand and that perceived from a distance. In the film sequences of We’ll Become Oil, he depicts an apocalyptic end-time mood. The ambivalence of direct and indirect involvement and threat of violence, its ritualistic self-celebration, its self-destructive tendencies, and its ruthless will to annihilate collide with the beauty that can inhere in the process of destruction.
Grecu simulates the ritual of helicopters circling each other. At first, it appears as an artful play of formations and balances; then suddenly it turns into a battle, which ultimately leads to the helicopters’ self-destruction. Grecu takes us on a floating journey around the globe. We do not see cities, only open, untouched landscapes, wide river deltas, shimmering water. The landscapes grow increasingly dry and barren. In the distance, clouds of smoke from oil fields appear. The closer we get, the denser the smoke becomes, until we finally face an entirely unleashed, uncontrollable fire that seems to drive the entire globe toward self-destruction.
Dirk Eicken, in contrast, addresses events that lie far in the past but strikingly mirror today’s conflicts in the Arab world in his painting series Iran 1953.
In his research, Eicken came across press photographs that depict the political and human upheaval of those events in a distanced way. He selected a number of these as templates for his paintings.
His painting intensifies the human dimension. It is no longer merely about documenting specific scenes, but about portraying the prototypical stages of political protest.
Eicken thematizes the movement of the overall situation. He heightens this through his subtle use of color by placing the events in a twilight of historical black-and-white and focused color accents. These color bands update and emotionalize the events, drawing us into them.
Installation Views
