The art and exhibition project GAP-O means Giovane Arte Populare-Ostuni. I show various groups of works in Ostuni, all of which were created on site. They sketch the city and landscape of Puglia in relation to Italian culture. I assigned each group of works an Italian pseudonym with a corresponding artistic idea. Numerous young Italians live in Berlin. GAP-O could be seen as an attempt at a vicarious return in terms of art. The works are serious and light-hearted. They reject intellectual exaggeration as much as they reject price exaggeration. Populare is meant literally.
I could explore numerous artistic possibilities while studying illustration in Hamburg and media art at the Berlin Academy of Arts with Rebecca Horn. Therefore I never wanted to limit myself to a single technique or style. I thought that technical versatility was more important. This helped to define my artistic signature based on the exploration of content such as the culture of a society, its history and mythologisation. As a logical consequence I specialised in responding to places and their specific structures and making them visually apparent. Archaeologically inspired I try to peel away layers of perception of the present and history and to create a contextual pattern of what I find. It does not matter whether something happened yesterday or 200 years ago, whether it belongs to high culture or everyday culture, the sacred or the profane.
The insights gained in my work have made me sceptical of past modernism. The concept of modern art, which emerged from the spirit of Romanticism, continues to be mythologised and prolonged for commercial purposes on the art market. Terms such as authenticity, originality and artistic vision serve to create the exclusivity a closed circle in the art trade,
As a consequence, I conceived an experiment: GAP-O. From various possible artistic positions, I explored the town of Ostuni and possible Italian references. Whether Trecento fresco, giallo films or olive trees, whether photography, drawing or street art, the perspectives of the respective contexts together form a network of thoughts and observations. In this way, can do justice to the complexity of reality while remaining accessible to many viewers in the individual work complexes. Against the backdrop of a critical view of modernity, Italian artists are assigned pseudonyms to the individual groups of works. They are part of my own artistic identity, which is diverse and contradictory